Category: Food

Okinawa Allowances

February 29, 2024 By arne hendriks Off

During a recent visit to the Japanese island of Okinawa in search of the secret of smaller we were lucky enough to end up at Marina’s Cafe. Not because the food was good (which it was), but because we met its owner Mariko, who explained…

Human-sized Penguin

July 20, 2022 By arne hendriks Off

Global warming is causing many species of animals to shrink. That is why we’re intrigued by this counter-intuitive RESEARCH on prehistoric giant penguins. Most penguin species today are small to average sized flightless birds that live in the colder regions of the southern hemisphere. They…

Fry-Denial

December 23, 2021 By arne hendriks Off

In 2014 The Incredible Shrinking Man picked up on a story about Japanese McDonalds restaurants resorting to only selling small fries because of a frozen potato shortage. It seemed like a good idea. Now the Makudo’s or Makku’s, as they are called in Japan, are…

No Small Fish

February 10, 2021 By arne hendriks Off

One of many food-related ecological challenges is the overconsumption of fish. Worldwide, especially in the global south, fish is still a key component of a nutritious and healthy diet. Until we find and are able to produce widely available and sustainable alternatives (which we must)…

Shrink Exercise: Peel a Pomelo

January 24, 2021 By arne hendriks Off

“Peel a Pomelo” is a simple exercise allowing you to experience what it’s like to be smaller then you are. The trick is to hand-peel a pomelo while imagining you are peeling a mandarin. The pomelo (Citrus maxima) is the largest member of the citrus…

Rafting Monkeys

June 7, 2020 By arne hendriks Off

We know of only three species of pre-historic mammals that managed to cross the Atlantic ocean between Africa and South-America. One of them was the now extinct Ucayalipithecus monkey about 35 million years ago. The other species of “immigrant” mammals were New World Monkeys, flat-nosed…

Guts for Brains

January 12, 2020 By arne hendriks Off

The human brain is generally regarded as the organ that makes us stand out from all other life. People have unusually large brains in relation to the size of the body: About 3x larger than the brain of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. And…

Micro-Livestock’s Short Shadow

October 18, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options, a 2006 report released by the Food and Agriculture Organisation, assesses the impact of the livestock sector on environmental challenges, along with potential technical and policy approaches to mitigation. The livestock sector poses serious challenges to the environment at every…

Abundance Fantasies: Mukbang

April 9, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

In our series of abundance fantasies we investigate if and how the human desire for abundance can become a positive force for change. Most abundance fantasies revolve around an illustration of the central promise that if we act in a certain way we will be…

Shrink Exercise: Giant Vegetable Hugging

March 28, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

Hugging a giant vegetable initiates a light-hearted feeling of pleasure and relaxation, as well as the experience of being in the presence of a messenger from the future when the human species has become a lot smaller and the world is again a place of…

The Makhunik Ceiling

January 10, 2018 By arne hendriks Off

There are indications in the architecture that 100 years ago the average resident of Makhunik, in eastern Iran, measured just 100cm in height – some 50cm shorter than the average height at the time. Of the roughly 200 stone and clay houses that make up…

Deaf Fish

December 12, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

A recent study shows that every second farmed salmon we eat is deaf resulting of a deformity in the ear, caused by accelerated growth in aquaculture. The study’s lead author, Ms Tormey Reimer, says when they went looking for the cause of the deformity they…

Vechur A2 Milk

November 27, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

The Incredible Shrinking Man is not big on dairy because it promotes excess growth in the body. But we’ll make an exception for the milk of the tiny Vechur cow originating from the warm and humid climate of the state of Kerala in southern India. According…

Land Reclamation

November 5, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

It is certainly not a coincidence that the Dutch are known for their expertise in the process of land reclamation. They live surrounded by the sea and The Netherlands are a small country. Yet the most obvious reason for the Dutch desire to create new…

Kleiber’s Law

September 10, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

Large animals have slower metabolisms than small ones. A mouse must eat about 35% of its body mass every day not to starve whereas a human can survive on only 2%. The relationship follows a power law: basal metabolic rate (R) is proportional to the…

Fear of the Vegetarian

April 13, 2017 By arne hendriks 0

Brian Langerhans and Thomas deWitt of the department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M University examined the specificity with which freshwater snails use environmental cues to induce defensive phenotypes such as shrinking. In one environment they introduced a species of sunfish that eats snails, In the…

Darwin’s Finches

March 10, 2017 By arne hendriks Off

If the human species embraces a desire to become smaller, as it embraced the desire to become taller in the past and present, then it is of some interest to know how fast this desire could influence human size and if desire alone is enough.…

3rd Trimester Foetal Hunger

July 14, 2016 By arne hendriks 0

Perhaps pregnant women in their last trimester shouldn’t eat too much. In the winter of 1944/45 the Second World War resulted in a severe famine in the Netherlands. The Dutch survived on as little as 30% of their daily needed caloric intake. It is a…

Royal (Feynmann) Antelope

May 16, 2016 By arne hendriks 0

The royal antelope is the smallest member of the deer family. It stands only 25cm tall and weighs a mere 3kg. It is closer in size to a pet rabbit than to other antelopes. Its evolution may have been the result of dietary strategy. Antelopes…

Japanese Miniatures: Akakomugi

February 17, 2016 By arne hendriks 0

Japan is the conceptual epicentre of shrink philosophy. Our ongoing series of Japanese Miniatures collects and connects these stories and hopefully eventually will be able to inspire some of the fundamental Japanese sensitivity and desire towards smallness in the rest of the world. Akakomugi, an…