We never use them in our house. Either one. They are so danged large."Once turtles reach dinner-plate size, they appear at feeding grounds in nearshore waters." Sea Turtle Conservancy website
Dinner plates are apparently useful as a visual guide to size. But what, exactly, is dinner plate size?
The Dinner Diva website carries an article by Monica Reinagel, M.S., L.D./N. called "Why We Overeat." In this short piece Monica states "researchers have observed that the average size of a dinner plate in the 1950s was 9 inches across. By the 80’s it had grown to 11 inches and today the average dinner plate is a whopping 13 inches." I am going to check that right now. I have my grandmother's dishes in the cabinet. They date from well before the 1950s. They look like this.
AND this plate measures a whopping 9 7/8" in diameter. Almost a full 10". So much for researchers. Or else my grandmother surpassed the norm in her ownership of dinner plate size. Now I will measure a plate purchased from World Market circa 2003. It measures 10 3/4". And it is humungous. We never ever ate dinner on that plate. Maybe World Market went out of business here because their dinner plates were too large. Just sayin'.
Occasionally you will hear rumblings about human size and life-span that go like this: Our lives have gotten longer on the average and we humans have become larger on the average over the course of time since the middle ages. In the middle ages, the average lifespan was 55, if you made it through the first few years of your life. The average height was somewhat less than ours, depending on who you are talking to about this. The enlarging trend does not hold up retrospectively if we look further back into humanity though, according to some.
How about Dee Finney's site "Giants of the Bible." She describes giants of Peru. "Some of these men were so tall that from the knee down they were as big as a man. Their eyes were the size of plates." The plate business again.
The website titled "Vegetarians Are Evil" claims that men have lost size and stature simply because they formed an agricultural society instead of staying hunter-gatherers, as they originally were.
However, most dietitians point out that we are actually too large, if not too tall. The real link to our growth is based on our dinner plates. Just sayin'.
Here is a dinner plate of the Deruta majolica variety. It was introduced to Italy by the Spanish in the 11th century, which puts it well before the 1950s. I have no idea how large this plate is. Maybe it isn't even a dinner plate. Just sayin'.
So, what size is a sea turtle that is the size of a dinner plate? I don't know. This is making me grouchy.
I do not know what we would use a sea turtle for, either.
baby sea turtle photo from Sea Turtle Cafe
