The sleeping dragon of rebellion 29 Cuisine dinners that participants were told would be made available to them free of charge.’ You’ ve got to give them credit don’ t you? That was clever: government-endorsed free food for college students! It was important, given the nature of this study, that the gullible, and relatively poor, guinea pigs believed they had to go on a diet. Next they were given a taste test with three different groups of popular cookies and the following instructions:‘ This is a standardized task so you will be given a full 10 minutes to complete it. If you are done early, please feel free to help yourself to cookies – in fact, we have tons – but just make sure that you don’ t change any of your taste ratings.’ So what did they find? The subjects who were about to go on the fictional free diet ate significantly more cookies than subjects who were not going on a diet. A previous researcher had aptly named this the Last Supper Effect. From an evolutionary point of view, if our food supply is under threat, it makes sense to eat up big while we still can. You’ ll be undoubtedly relieved to know that, in the end, the students were fully debriefed on how and why they had been duped by the researchers. Even with no obvious threat, we are very much designed to feast today as a famine may be upon us tomorrow. In the developed world, we can happily feast every day without concern for the future. The world that we were designed for is not as far away as you might think – it can be reached by boarding a flight to your nearest developing country. It is a sad paradox that the greatest health problem in the developed world is being overweight while the greatest health problem in the developing world is being underweight!