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This is weirdly not scientific, like at all. Doesn't seem to fit the channel. Not a fan of content like this. Usually a big, big fan. I like to learn, just not about mythological creatures eating habits.
You guys need to stop with the jokes! Stop! Have you done a video on permaculture or more specifically the relationships between microorganisms, earth, water, poop, food, etc.? Think it's right up your alley! I better hear some gut wrenching comedy about eating poop too!
Hobbits are farmers, for the most part. In a pre-industrial world, farming was a very labor-intensive job. You'd need seven meals a day to keep up with the calories you burn off doing all that work. And for the wealthy hobbits of leisure, like Bilbo, the culture of eating seven meals in a day would still be there, even if he's not doing the physical work to burn off all those calories.
Where's your evidence that farmers in ancient times ate 7 meals a day? The many meals where supper, dinner, luncheon, afternoon tea etc seems to have been exclusively upper class.
@@64standardtrickyness we actually have the common dinner Plans for a lot of cultures. Classical Egyptains farmers eat round about 4000 cal of food in 5 meals While the higher ups eat 3 times and 3000 cal In ancient Greece and rome people eat 3 times a day. A small meal Made from leftovers of Dinner for Breakfast. Than an optional lunch mostly Made from Cold foods or warm ones you bought from essentaly fast food ventors. This actually survived in the southern german Tradition of Vesber what is a bread and could platter meal you even get in a lot of Restaurants in south germany and Austria. Than the main meal Dinner called Cena The First real warm meal.
rather than choosing fictional creatures it is better to compare with real living things. like the comparison of the portion of food between humans and mice, if you compare humans with hobbits, I think it's hard to imagine because hobbits are fictional creatures if talking about fictional creatures in educational programs, wouldn't it be better to explain whether these creatures can live in the real world or not (like the dragon episode)
I’ve been a type 1 diabetic since childhood. One thing I learned years ago was that my blood sugar was much easier to control if I ate many small meals throughout the day. No giant blood glucose spikes from carbs that way. Perhaps the Hobbits are simply better at spreading their meals out to keep their blood sugar stable.
"Four full HOBBIT-SIZED meals"--that's the real distinction here. They eat more often but the amount per meal and overall is FAR LESS than what a human can/would eat.
Except the various depictions of what they eat in the movie is not at all less than what a human would eat. For instance when you look at the plate of Bilbo in the beginning of The Hobbit, or when Pippin eats 4 full Lembas Bread when it is said than a single bite would be sufficient for an adult man/elf.
Not to hate on this channel, I actually love their videos. However this video is VERY forced and sweeps a lot of important assumptions under the rug. I'm pretty sure they started at the meal ratio they needed to get and just backwards engineered the algebra to get at the the hobbit's weight of 16kg.
Whenever I meet someone who has watched or read LotR, we invariably end up in a discussion about where in Middle-earth we'd like to live. My new friends are always all about Rohan or Gondor, because they look so cool! Rivendell and Lothlorien are common answers as well, because they're so pretty and elegant! Even have a few who want to live in Dale or the Lonely Mountain (after a bit of Smaug removal, of course). So far, I'm the only one who would want to live in the Shire. I mean, ya get plenty to eat, there aren't wars all the time, and those homes are the comfiest and coziest in all the realms. Let the wizards fiddle about with their rings, I have a lasagna to bake!
Lonely mountain without the Smaug removal. Wouldn't say no to a pet dragon. If not for the dragon to keep the people away, it wouldn't even be lonely. Ofc i would need some powers to be safe, but assuming i had them, i would first provoke and annoy him (in a kind, joking way, nothing too serious) until he's so done with it he has even given up trying to kill me. Once he knows that's not going to happen anyway, i would subtly start suggesting the benefits to having me as a friend and show him some appreciation for having him around, small gifts and whatnot. And so on. Until i become his greatest treasure.
Same… I mean who would want to stay live with Men who always are on the verge of war or with Elves who although elegant but are too calm and stay on vegetables diet. I would rather live a cozy, fun and healthy life in Shire. You eat lots of food, have a nice little house and gets to enjoy nature. That’s the most comfortable thing in life.
Stuff like this is why I actually found biology interesting. I clearly remember asking my college biology teacher, after hearing why cell DNA degrades over time, if fantasy races with extended lifespans worked because such degeneration was slowed for them. And to his credit he thought that was an interesting theory and entertained me for a few minutes discussing more about it.
Fantasy is a great source of questions and science loves question asking. Why is the sky blue? Why do we have 5 toes? How big is the Sun? What is the mass of a proton? If our lifespan is ≈80yrs and an Elf's is ≈200yrs (probably wrong number) then what is the difference using the laws of science? All are equally valid questions in science and can have surprisingly complex or involved answers. And one day those answers or processes could be insanely important. Take: Whats a good way of finding prime numbers? 1800's Euler finds an answer, he has no computers and primes are just a math oddity for his era. 1970's computers are getting stonger and encryption need to be a thing, and primes having a property of 3*7 = 21 and since 3 & 7 are primes 21 only factors to 1*21&3*7 and if you do this with insanely large numbers no one could ever unfactor it prime numbers just made internet security work and prime numbers are now worth the worlds economy. It took 200yrs for that one discovery for "pure math" to become the backbone of society, imagine what other strange discoveries found by answering "stupid questions" could become in a few hundred years. Yours could be the secret to biological immortality (not dieing of old age/disease).
Taking science from fantasy is just theoretical questions that people call you a nerd for. It doesn't specifically have to be a Tolkien elf, it could be something like "Would slower degeneration cause you to live longer. If so, what rate of degeneration would be needed to live 2,000 years?" The answer to "do fantasy races have extended lifespans because of slowed degeneration?" is "who the fuck knows ask the author". And the author probably won't know or care. Definitely a stupid question when you phrase it like that. I'm something of an author myself (just hobby writing) and if you asked me that about one of my characters I'd say "because she has a lot of special fantasy magical magic fantasy energy magic fuck off". lol
From what i remember, all the 7 mealtimes Tolkien listed for the hobbits are actual mealtimes, and historically all of those meals would have been eaten every day. However, much as was pointed out in the video for it being hobbit sized meals, they were far smaller than traditional meals we eat today, as our current mealtimes are based around our work taking up most of the daytime, with only enough breaktime for 1 meal in the day.
Hobits aren't actually naturally small. They just have such a high metabolism that no hobbit have ever been had access to the amount of food required for them to be able to grow to full size.
Four full meals and three snacks… then breakfast, luncheon, dinner, and supper would count as the meals, and second breakfast, elevenses, and afternoon tea are the snacks.
@@ChrissieBear alright I didn't know that, thanks, in Italy we eat dinner past (in some places, way past) 8 pm so there's no need for a snack before bed.
Agricultural labour in Kent and Sussex, eg during hop picking, was: breakfast at home before leaving for work at about 5.30am; lunch about 10am in the field; dinner about 1pm usually in pub with beer; tea about 3pm in the field; leave work about 4.30pm to 5pm for supper at home as main meal of day about 6pm. Burned lots of calories!
Outside of my trigonometry course or scientific theory, I never thought I'd know exactly when I would need Kleiber's Law! Here out of the blue on Minute Earth, I came up against my arch-nemesis then quickly remembered the exact formula!👏💓
The hobbits are also smaller than humans so that they don't have to dig out as much dirt to make a livable home. Dwarves, who also live underground, also have this going (even though they seem to prefer to dig out massively expansive homes anyway), but they also live in stone rather than dirt, so they're also stockier so as to be able to break rocks easier.
Prediction before watching the video: Hobbits are small, lower volume/surface area ration means they lose heat faster and they have to eat more to stay warm.
One of your best video in years!!! Sooo very well explained and illustrated in a way that made me sens then in my own head!! Amazing work Minute Earth! Keep it up!
Would have liked to know how you arrived at the 16kg figure, because honestly that feels like a very low estimate. My dog weighs double that, yet occupies a similar volume to what I imagine a 3 foot hobbit would. Plus I can curl a 30kg dumbell - I wouldn't expect to be able to support two hobbits on each arm.
@@TJStellmach That's true...but hobbits still have the overall built of a adult humans, even if they're smaller. They're stocky folks, the females have (very) womanly figures and the males (being farmers and craftsmen) would be reasonably muscular and with growing age somewhat 'rotund'. So small or not, they wouldn't have the bodies of prepubercent children and weigh quite a bit more than a human of the same size.
@@raraavis7782 , I checked out a 1996 study for height/weight of real humans with dwarfism and found the weight for an adult around the size of the average hobbit is 20-25 kg. However, there are likely other biological differences between humans and hobbits that could result in them actually weighing less.
It's six times a day. I don't know why the movies added a meal, but the books specifically say six. Neat video, though :) Since Tolkien was a literary guy, not a biologist, I doubt he was thinking along these lines when he created Hobbits (though who knows, he was a smart dude...). It's really fun that it worked out to kinda make sense scientifically.
By British countryside tradition, Elevenses, Afternoon Tea, and Supper would be smaller. So I would estimate four meals and three snacks. On Midwestern American farms, Breakfast is a very large meal, so I can understand splitting it up. Still, this isn't something I'd previously considered. Thanks.
My problem with products like wren: They make you feel all you are doing is not good, but OK once you have payed for it. When you like to travel by plane, just give somebody a few bucks to plant some trees so that the carbon emission you caused gets canceled by the trees. You know... of instead just maybe teach people to step back and just consume less energy (I know that would kinda break their business model). Such services just calm your conscious - like _Light Yogurt_
Why is that a problem? The greenhouse effect doesn't care whether you emitted some carbon and recaptured it or just never emitted it in the first place.
MY problem with Wren is that it's yet another attempt at perpetuating the "do your part" mindset that the public has been forcefed so that corporations and unethical industry can continue to operate using cheap but environmentally devastating practices. So individual households keep their ac/heating off, walk more, and flush their toilets less, and yet multi-billion dollar companies get to continue to ignore everything but their bottom line. Everything the every day people can do to help is a drop in the bucket compared to the effects that international companies are having, and they know this, because they're the ones that started these "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" type movements, all in order to deflect regulation from forcing them to change. I think it's admirable to be mindful of your own carbon footprint, but until these big polluters start giving a crap about the world, the impact to change things for the better is going to remain insufficient, and the public awareness that the common man is to blame for the current climate crisis is more damaging than people think.
counter-COUNTERpoint: large industries do far worse than individuals, even when you add up the contributions of people as a group. asking people to change their habits is nice- everything helps after all, but placing the main burden on the individual is like arranging the deck chairs on the titanic, when we really should be telling the captain and crew to stay the fuck away from things that can tear a hole in the hull. This is sadly less easy because that requires things like "vote people into office that will pass green regulations and suplex corporations into playing nice with our home" and "our current social system is built on a deeply exploitative foundation, and going green also means eventually overhauling those factors of our societies. Which means reckoning with more than "i should turn my lights off"."
Counter point: Energy use per Capita is a strong indicator of a nations quality of life. (Plot Human development index and similar of 1 axis and energy per Capita on the other for all the worlds nations and a strong correlation is evident) So a big focus needs to be on supplying energy in good ways, (NEVER COAL) but literally every PRIMARY energy source has problems, but solar and winds' environmental downsides are not worse than fossil fuels. Additionally western nations like the USA and EU (nation group) are lowering output of GHGs, but we have a long way to go and a big part of that is forcing Companies to view environmental externalities as substracted from their bottom line. (Some very smart people have placed a dollar value on economic loses per kg of C02 emited accounting for basically everything) But some "Developing" nations like India and China do not care about the environment and simply build Coal plants burning cheap "Brown" coal, the worst of the coals. So its not just about forcing companies to go green, and its not just getting Americans as individuals to go green, its about forcing the governments of the world to go green or face economic sanctions. Note: not looking for a heated argument, just contributing facts from college classes on the topic to the discussion and playing devil's advocate because everyone should always be asked to think about strong held beliefs with some new light, and its ok to double down.
@@jasonreed7522 I agree wholeheartedly, getting the governments in charge of these offending companies to acknowledge the issue and act, is most likely the only way to for them to change, as it's not like they don't know what they are doing but they continue due to pure selfish motivations. It feels bad that developing countries with enormous populations (India) have to have their progress stifled when the other major powers of the world benefitted from polluting decades ago, but having those countries slowly develop until they're capable of sustainable growth isn't worth the environmental damage, both in the direct sense and the example they are providing to the rest of the world's leaders. ("USA: Oh you're telling us to keep our carbon footprint down? Go have a word with India over there, I ain't changing shit.")
It all falls apart if you actually read the books and notice that their meals are described as full-sized meals made up of highly caloric meats, cheeses and similar.
He was definitely feeling bloated after that. The explanation probably involves that, while Lembas does nourish you, your body takes time to catch up with the fact that it's more nourished than it expects to be after only a relatively small amount of eating. So by the time Pippin is finishing his fourth piece, the first is finally kicking in to trigger the satiation response. It's similar to how humans can easily end up over-eating by eating too quickly and not realizing they should be full until they've already overeaten, just more pronounced. Add to that the fact that waybread is meant to 'fill you' the same way travel rations might - it gives you just about what you need, but an organism can comfortably eat more than its minimum needs by a fair margin when resources are available without detriment in order to have extra resources for later. So even if a human can get by on a bit of lembas every day, they'll be really jonesing for a real meal after a long enough of making do.
I don't about the lore of hobbits, but according to the video they don't, they eat far less per day than humans. However they do eat a lot more per day per unit of mass than humans.
@@nafrost2787 MinuteEarth should make a video about how stupid your comment is "I don't know about this thing but this video this guy says is wrong says it's this and therefore the video must be true even though I don't know a thing about what they're talking about"
That's in the film. The book doesn't have that scene (and elsewhere it says that one day's rations for a man doing a full day's march is a full wafer of lembas, not just one bite).
On the topic of heat loss, differently for ectothermic animals, sure they also lose heat proportionally but their cells don't produce as much heat so they have way less energy requirements, and let's suppose their environment is somewhere tropical where they don't necessarily need to expend energy to bask or whatever and there isn't much temp variation, do we see disparity on energy consumption between different sizes?
Children eat bigger meals, I guess... In any case, the energy needs of children should be greater than a hobbit because children are growing much faster and larger than an adult hobbit of the same size.
ideally yes, but because the culture is 3 square meal a day. Teenagers and infants, especially need to eat more often. Sadly high schools don't usually allow snacking during class.
When my growth spurt hit I definitely was eating at least 7 times a day o_o The teachers tried sending me to the principal's for snacking and my mom just blew them off.
humans in general don't need 3 meals a day, out stomach can be trained to let us survive with one meal and two snacks a day, where "meal" is considered a banquet by today's standards. That's why we have the gallbladder, people that have it removed find barely any difference if they eat at the same rate as always, but if you went back to hunter gatherer's or even just romans rhythms, they'd struggle. So assuming humanoids' culture evolves to make meals just the size to never trigger the gallbladder, hobbits would prefer 7 meals a day while probably being fine with just 2 meals and one snack.
The gang over at Shadiversity tried a day of hobbit eating, but did not include the agrarian work load, and their portions were on the large side even so. They were in various amounts of pain and misery.
1:00 why not clear? is it 1.6*****. there is this specific natural number every plant follows why shouldn't it be that too? 1.(6*?) is very similar to 1.(75)
Aye, the real point of scaling that gets overlooked when talking about halfling mealtime is the size of the meals - if we assume meal size scales with mass or volume directly (which it should, given the basic mechanics of actually eating), that matters a lot, and this video *does* take that into account, if only implicitly by referencing 'hobbit-sized meals' in the final breakdown, without necessarily clarifying that term. While an 80 kg man might eat 0.5 kg of food in a large meal, a 16 kg halfling (1/5 the mass) would eat 0.1 kg of food in the same large meal. Since the halfling needs (1/5)^(3/4) ~= 0.3 times the food as the man, he needs to eat (0.3 / (1/5) ) ~= 1.5 times as many meals Since we assume the human eats 3 meals and a snack (call it 3.5 meals), that would give us about 5.25 meals for a halfling. 5.25 equivalent meals easily comes out to 4 full meals, 2 snacks, and a light afternoon tea. The specific breakdown is probably mostly cultural, as Shire hobbits seem to enjoy the opportunity to slow down and enjoy things, balanced against the need to get things done in an agrarian setting like the Shire.
It could also be that they produce far more food than they can reasonably store, so they've developed a culture of eating in excess to avoid food spoilage. We don't know how they farm, but they've been working the same land for centuries, and their territory is very large with a comparatively small population. It wouldn't be beyond the pale that their farming practices have just far outproduced their actual need.
What about an adults child, do they need to eat the same amount of food as hobbits do? Do our own meals need to be structured differently as we grow up? Is this why children are always hungry? Is everything I thought I knew about children's eating habits a lie?! What about when they get a growth spurt, do they suddenly need to 'eat more' because of Kliber's law or because they are using up extra energy to well, grow? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!
@@bentoth9555 I mean, in terms of what is in them, sure. But wouldn't their plates and pots and overall sizes of food portions be smaller as well? And therefore have less calories?
I know you were trying to be all cute pointing out metabolic needs and such but the real reason is a reason why is because they are farmers, who would similarly eat about seven small meals. You get up and have Breakfast You do the early morning chores, then eat Second Breakfast More chores, Elevensies Chores, Lunch Chores, Afternoon Tea Finish up daily chores, Dinner Evening chores, then Supper\ Humans would eat like this in a similar manner if they were a hard working farmer.
Does this mean that babies and children need to eat relatively more than full sized adults? Also do smaller humans (shorter/thinner) have to eat relatively more than larger ones, or are there other biological factures that are more dominant such that these explanations don't apply to humans of different sizes?
Shouldnt the energy requirement of a hobbit be greater concidering that brains need a lot of energy. As far as i know Hobbits are of human intelligence, so they should need the same amount of calories
You can choose to eat more, smaller meals during the day regardless of how many calories you need relative to your body weight. This is like asking why small pizzas have fewer slices.
And they do! Or at least I did. Small early breakfast, second breakfast at school, lunch at school, soup at home, snack, and dinner. And I always was and still am rather slim.
Well...my sister in law is a kindergarden teacher and she says, healthy, active children do indeed prefer (and do best) with 3 meals and 2 snacks in between. They have a very hard time, bridging the time between main meals, since they do have a high metabolism and also often don't like eating huge portions at once. And you have to consider, that they usually go to bed straight after dinner - so that's by default the last meal. So 5-6 'meals' of varying sizes is rather the norm for kids.
I’d say I doubt that Tolkien put that much thought into his world, but then I remember that this man made a world to justify his language creation hobby
lets look at that makreel with potato diner round about 400 calories and that was one meal. bilbo and Frodo were more active an less gullotones members of the hobbit species so they mostlikly eat more like humans one or three times and a snack. and a hobbit must weigth atleast around 30 kg and is about 1,2 meters high
1:30 That movie, Honey I Shrunk the Kids" is just wrong. If you shrunk a human to the size of a mouse that person would die of hypothermia almost right away, even if it was a hot day. The heat would just leave their body way to fast.
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I like food
Heheh
Hi
This is weirdly not scientific, like at all. Doesn't seem to fit the channel. Not a fan of content like this. Usually a big, big fan. I like to learn, just not about mythological creatures eating habits.
You guys need to stop with the jokes! Stop! Have you done a video on permaculture or more specifically the relationships between microorganisms, earth, water, poop, food, etc.? Think it's right up your alley! I better hear some gut wrenching comedy about eating poop too!
Hobbits are farmers, for the most part. In a pre-industrial world, farming was a very labor-intensive job. You'd need seven meals a day to keep up with the calories you burn off doing all that work. And for the wealthy hobbits of leisure, like Bilbo, the culture of eating seven meals in a day would still be there, even if he's not doing the physical work to burn off all those calories.
only that bilbo was uniqe that he only eat 3 times a day and recularly wanders to Riventale
Where's your evidence that farmers in ancient times ate 7 meals a day?
The many meals where supper, dinner, luncheon, afternoon tea etc seems to have been exclusively upper class.
@@64standardtrickyness we actually have the common dinner Plans for a lot of cultures.
Classical Egyptains farmers eat round about 4000 cal of food in 5 meals
While the higher ups eat 3 times and 3000 cal
In ancient Greece and rome people eat 3 times a day.
A small meal Made from leftovers of Dinner for Breakfast.
Than an optional lunch mostly Made from Cold foods or warm ones you bought from essentaly fast food ventors.
This actually survived in the southern german Tradition of Vesber what is a bread and could platter meal you even get in a lot of Restaurants in south germany and Austria.
Than the main meal Dinner called Cena
The First real warm meal.
that's a stupid theory, all human cultures were farmers and none have retained 7 meals a day, what's the difference between humans and hobbits then?
@@dr.tafazzi Hobbits are fictional.
Finally, MinuteEarth is asking the most important questions
rather than choosing fictional creatures it is better to compare with real living things. like the comparison of the portion of food between humans and mice, if you compare humans with hobbits, I think it's hard to imagine because hobbits are fictional creatures
if talking about fictional creatures in educational programs, wouldn't it be better to explain whether these creatures can live in the real world or not (like the dragon episode)
for me i eat vitamins, maybe snack or desert, breakfest, maybe snack or desert, lunch, maybe snack or desert, dinner, maybe snack or desert
I’ve been a type 1 diabetic since childhood. One thing I learned years ago was that my blood sugar was much easier to control if I ate many small meals throughout the day. No giant blood glucose spikes from carbs that way. Perhaps the Hobbits are simply better at spreading their meals out to keep their blood sugar stable.
My dad is type 2.
Wow! My cousin has diabetes type 1 and my dad has type 2!
good idea i have diabetes i have a kinda simalar diet to hobbits already but maybe i should be even more simalar
"Four full HOBBIT-SIZED meals"--that's the real distinction here.
They eat more often but the amount per meal and overall is FAR LESS than what a human can/would eat.
I think they've considered the volume inside a hobbit's belly (a.k.a how much food they can eat each meal) to count the amount of meals
@@lucasmochi91 exactly. I just wish they made it more obvious earlier on that's the distinction they were going for.
Except the various depictions of what they eat in the movie is not at all less than what a human would eat. For instance when you look at the plate of Bilbo in the beginning of The Hobbit, or when Pippin eats 4 full Lembas Bread when it is said than a single bite would be sufficient for an adult man/elf.
@@drmaggot1173 I forgot about this. Makes the video a little less genuine.
Not to hate on this channel, I actually love their videos. However this video is VERY forced and sweeps a lot of important assumptions under the rug. I'm pretty sure they started at the meal ratio they needed to get and just backwards engineered the algebra to get at the the hobbit's weight of 16kg.
Whenever I meet someone who has watched or read LotR, we invariably end up in a discussion about where in Middle-earth we'd like to live. My new friends are always all about Rohan or Gondor, because they look so cool! Rivendell and Lothlorien are common answers as well, because they're so pretty and elegant! Even have a few who want to live in Dale or the Lonely Mountain (after a bit of Smaug removal, of course). So far, I'm the only one who would want to live in the Shire. I mean, ya get plenty to eat, there aren't wars all the time, and those homes are the comfiest and coziest in all the realms. Let the wizards fiddle about with their rings, I have a lasagna to bake!
Lonely mountain without the Smaug removal. Wouldn't say no to a pet dragon. If not for the dragon to keep the people away, it wouldn't even be lonely.
Ofc i would need some powers to be safe, but assuming i had them, i would first provoke and annoy him (in a kind, joking way, nothing too serious) until he's so done with it he has even given up trying to kill me. Once he knows that's not going to happen anyway, i would subtly start suggesting the benefits to having me as a friend and show him some appreciation for having him around, small gifts and whatnot. And so on. Until i become his greatest treasure.
My dream home is a hobbit cottage. I would never leave.
Same… I mean who would want to stay live with Men who always are on the verge of war or with Elves who although elegant but are too calm and stay on vegetables diet. I would rather live a cozy, fun and healthy life in Shire. You eat lots of food, have a nice little house and gets to enjoy nature. That’s the most comfortable thing in life.
And, there is a tavern, and parties. I bet there are big fat weddings, and that even funerals are enjoyable.
I’d be your neighbor.
Stuff like this is why I actually found biology interesting. I clearly remember asking my college biology teacher, after hearing why cell DNA degrades over time, if fantasy races with extended lifespans worked because such degeneration was slowed for them. And to his credit he thought that was an interesting theory and entertained me for a few minutes discussing more about it.
Fantasy is a great source of questions and science loves question asking.
Why is the sky blue?
Why do we have 5 toes?
How big is the Sun?
What is the mass of a proton?
If our lifespan is ≈80yrs and an Elf's is ≈200yrs (probably wrong number) then what is the difference using the laws of science?
All are equally valid questions in science and can have surprisingly complex or involved answers. And one day those answers or processes could be insanely important.
Take:
Whats a good way of finding prime numbers?
1800's Euler finds an answer, he has no computers and primes are just a math oddity for his era.
1970's computers are getting stonger and encryption need to be a thing, and primes having a property of 3*7 = 21 and since 3 & 7 are primes 21 only factors to 1*21&3*7 and if you do this with insanely large numbers no one could ever unfactor it prime numbers just made internet security work and prime numbers are now worth the worlds economy.
It took 200yrs for that one discovery for "pure math" to become the backbone of society, imagine what other strange discoveries found by answering "stupid questions" could become in a few hundred years. Yours could be the secret to biological immortality (not dieing of old age/disease).
Taking science from fantasy is just theoretical questions that people call you a nerd for. It doesn't specifically have to be a Tolkien elf, it could be something like "Would slower degeneration cause you to live longer. If so, what rate of degeneration would be needed to live 2,000 years?" The answer to "do fantasy races have extended lifespans because of slowed degeneration?" is "who the fuck knows ask the author". And the author probably won't know or care. Definitely a stupid question when you phrase it like that. I'm something of an author myself (just hobby writing) and if you asked me that about one of my characters I'd say "because she has a lot of special fantasy magical magic fantasy energy magic fuck off". lol
When your world building is so robust that even science from 70 years later agrees with you
This feels like a film theory episode
but without cringe jokes and fillers
This is science!
Yeah
But better and more to the point
Yeah and condensed into 3 minutes instead of extended to 15. And also backed by real science. And also good.
From what i remember, all the 7 mealtimes Tolkien listed for the hobbits are actual mealtimes, and historically all of those meals would have been eaten every day. However, much as was pointed out in the video for it being hobbit sized meals, they were far smaller than traditional meals we eat today, as our current mealtimes are based around our work taking up most of the daytime, with only enough breaktime for 1 meal in the day.
Hobits aren't actually naturally small. They just have such a high metabolism that no hobbit have ever been had access to the amount of food required for them to be able to grow to full size.
Well that makes sense
wow how much did bilbo baggins grand father eat? he was so big he could ride a horse!
@@CallMeMimi27 Great great granduncle actually. It was his grandfather Gerontius 'the Old Took's granduncle Bandobras 'the Bullroarer' Took.
Is that actually from the book?
@@benthomason3307 No, not about their height being due to metabolism no.
Four full meals and three snacks… then breakfast, luncheon, dinner, and supper would count as the meals, and second breakfast, elevenses, and afternoon tea are the snacks.
difference between dinner and supper?
@@dr.tafazzi Normally they are synonyms, but in Hobbit Culture, they are different.
@@dr.tafazzi Originally dinner and supper were two different meals, one was the main meal of the day and the other was a light meal eaten before bed.
@@ChrissieBear alright I didn't know that, thanks, in Italy we eat dinner past (in some places, way past) 8 pm so there's no need for a snack before bed.
I…. I already eat like that
Agricultural labour in Kent and Sussex, eg during hop picking, was: breakfast at home before leaving for work at about 5.30am; lunch about 10am in the field; dinner about 1pm usually in pub with beer; tea about 3pm in the field; leave work about 4.30pm to 5pm for supper at home as main meal of day about 6pm. Burned lots of calories!
Outside of my trigonometry course or scientific theory, I never thought I'd know exactly when I would need Kleiber's Law! Here out of the blue on Minute Earth, I came up against my arch-nemesis then quickly remembered the exact formula!👏💓
“Being small, and being hungry”
…. That sounds like me
Me waking up 11:30 o'clock on quarantine day: "What the heck is second breakfast?!"
16kg sounds a little light for a hobbit, but I haven't put that much thought into it either.
Proportionally, such a hobbit is built like a 115kg human (assuming a 3 foot hobbit and a 5'9" human).
It's about the correct weight for a human child of that height so it's definitely a reasonable estimate.
I loved the “this is David from middle earth” intro.
The hobbits are also smaller than humans so that they don't have to dig out as much dirt to make a livable home. Dwarves, who also live underground, also have this going (even though they seem to prefer to dig out massively expansive homes anyway), but they also live in stone rather than dirt, so they're also stockier so as to be able to break rocks easier.
Birds: let us introduce our all day meal menu.
Prediction before watching the video: Hobbits are small, lower volume/surface area ration means they lose heat faster and they have to eat more to stay warm.
One of your best video in years!!! Sooo very well explained and illustrated in a way that made me sens then in my own head!! Amazing work Minute Earth! Keep it up!
"Why do hobbits need 7 meals?" Because potato said the writter.
Because. Potato.
potato
po-ta-to?
“Because I’m a potato” - GLaDOS
@@chaomatic5328 boil em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew
@@matheussanthiago9685 * disgruntled smeagol noise *
This is like the coolest thing I've ever seen!
Would have liked to know how you arrived at the 16kg figure, because honestly that feels like a very low estimate. My dog weighs double that, yet occupies a similar volume to what I imagine a 3 foot hobbit would. Plus I can curl a 30kg dumbell - I wouldn't expect to be able to support two hobbits on each arm.
Human children average 3 feet tall at age 3 or so, and those same children average about 14kg.
@@TJStellmach
That's true...but hobbits still have the overall built of a adult humans, even if they're smaller. They're stocky folks, the females have (very) womanly figures and the males (being farmers and craftsmen) would be reasonably muscular and with growing age somewhat 'rotund'.
So small or not, they wouldn't have the bodies of prepubercent children and weigh quite a bit more than a human of the same size.
yeah, 25 kg at least sounds more reasonable for a small adult
@@raraavis7782 , I checked out a 1996 study for height/weight of real humans with dwarfism and found the weight for an adult around the size of the average hobbit is 20-25 kg. However, there are likely other biological differences between humans and hobbits that could result in them actually weighing less.
You also have to consider the size of their feet. That should add another couple pounds
Today, I learned I'm a hobbit, with my two breakfasts, and my two lunches, and my dinner, and all the food in between.
I'll keep this in mind for my halfling and gnome characters
It's six times a day. I don't know why the movies added a meal, but the books specifically say six.
Neat video, though :) Since Tolkien was a literary guy, not a biologist, I doubt he was thinking along these lines when he created Hobbits (though who knows, he was a smart dude...). It's really fun that it worked out to kinda make sense scientifically.
six is exactly what you expect from L^2/3 scaling. 1/2 sized hobbit eats 1/4 the food but each meal is 1/8 the mass therefore twice the meals.
Show me anywhere in canon that a Hobbit would object to adding a meal.
@@AtarahDerek some would like how humans may object to adding a 4th meal but some have it anyway for their own reasons
@@AtarahDerek LOL, fair.
That's what I thought, and was going to say.
By British countryside tradition, Elevenses, Afternoon Tea, and Supper would be smaller. So I would estimate four meals and three snacks. On Midwestern American farms, Breakfast is a very large meal, so I can understand splitting it up.
Still, this isn't something I'd previously considered. Thanks.
I love how you still didn't forget to draw extra hair on the feet of the Hobbits, even if they're stick figures.
My problem with products like wren: They make you feel all you are doing is not good, but OK once you have payed for it. When you like to travel by plane, just give somebody a few bucks to plant some trees so that the carbon emission you caused gets canceled by the trees.
You know... of instead just maybe teach people to step back and just consume less energy (I know that would kinda break their business model). Such services just calm your conscious - like _Light Yogurt_
Why is that a problem? The greenhouse effect doesn't care whether you emitted some carbon and recaptured it or just never emitted it in the first place.
MY problem with Wren is that it's yet another attempt at perpetuating the "do your part" mindset that the public has been forcefed so that corporations and unethical industry can continue to operate using cheap but environmentally devastating practices.
So individual households keep their ac/heating off, walk more, and flush their toilets less, and yet multi-billion dollar companies get to continue to ignore everything but their bottom line.
Everything the every day people can do to help is a drop in the bucket compared to the effects that international companies are having, and they know this, because they're the ones that started these "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" type movements, all in order to deflect regulation from forcing them to change.
I think it's admirable to be mindful of your own carbon footprint, but until these big polluters start giving a crap about the world, the impact to change things for the better is going to remain insufficient, and the public awareness that the common man is to blame for the current climate crisis is more damaging than people think.
counter-COUNTERpoint: large industries do far worse than individuals, even when you add up the contributions of people as a group. asking people to change their habits is nice- everything helps after all, but placing the main burden on the individual is like arranging the deck chairs on the titanic, when we really should be telling the captain and crew to stay the fuck away from things that can tear a hole in the hull.
This is sadly less easy because that requires things like "vote people into office that will pass green regulations and suplex corporations into playing nice with our home" and "our current social system is built on a deeply exploitative foundation, and going green also means eventually overhauling those factors of our societies. Which means reckoning with more than "i should turn my lights off"."
Counter point:
Energy use per Capita is a strong indicator of a nations quality of life. (Plot Human development index and similar of 1 axis and energy per Capita on the other for all the worlds nations and a strong correlation is evident)
So a big focus needs to be on supplying energy in good ways, (NEVER COAL) but literally every PRIMARY energy source has problems, but solar and winds' environmental downsides are not worse than fossil fuels.
Additionally western nations like the USA and EU (nation group) are lowering output of GHGs, but we have a long way to go and a big part of that is forcing Companies to view environmental externalities as substracted from their bottom line. (Some very smart people have placed a dollar value on economic loses per kg of C02 emited accounting for basically everything)
But some "Developing" nations like India and China do not care about the environment and simply build Coal plants burning cheap "Brown" coal, the worst of the coals. So its not just about forcing companies to go green, and its not just getting Americans as individuals to go green, its about forcing the governments of the world to go green or face economic sanctions.
Note: not looking for a heated argument, just contributing facts from college classes on the topic to the discussion and playing devil's advocate because everyone should always be asked to think about strong held beliefs with some new light, and its ok to double down.
@@jasonreed7522 I agree wholeheartedly, getting the governments in charge of these offending companies to acknowledge the issue and act, is most likely the only way to for them to change, as it's not like they don't know what they are doing but they continue due to pure selfish motivations.
It feels bad that developing countries with enormous populations (India) have to have their progress stifled when the other major powers of the world benefitted from polluting decades ago, but having those countries slowly develop until they're capable of sustainable growth isn't worth the environmental damage, both in the direct sense and the example they are providing to the rest of the world's leaders. ("USA: Oh you're telling us to keep our carbon footprint down? Go have a word with India over there, I ain't changing shit.")
Finally we're getting to the important questions
It all falls apart if you actually read the books and notice that their meals are described as full-sized meals made up of highly caloric meats, cheeses and similar.
How do you explain Pippin eating 4 whole pieces of Lembas? One of those should be at least seven meals on its own by the book's logic!
He was definitely feeling bloated after that. The explanation probably involves that, while Lembas does nourish you, your body takes time to catch up with the fact that it's more nourished than it expects to be after only a relatively small amount of eating. So by the time Pippin is finishing his fourth piece, the first is finally kicking in to trigger the satiation response. It's similar to how humans can easily end up over-eating by eating too quickly and not realizing they should be full until they've already overeaten, just more pronounced.
Add to that the fact that waybread is meant to 'fill you' the same way travel rations might - it gives you just about what you need, but an organism can comfortably eat more than its minimum needs by a fair margin when resources are available without detriment in order to have extra resources for later. So even if a human can get by on a bit of lembas every day, they'll be really jonesing for a real meal after a long enough of making do.
It took me a solid minute and a half to realize that the symbol for a unit of food he was using was lembas bread
So what you're saying is Aragorn committed a hate crime when he denied the hobbits a second breakfast.
Me, when I don't eat: I'm not hungry-
Grandma: *E A T*
Mb your grandma descends from Bilbo
grandmas is the first line of defense against anorexia
Interesting how I became interested only after you replaced the thumbnail and title.
This is endearing. But I've loved Hobbits since 1959 (when I first read The Hobbit).
"We've had one breakfast, yes, but what about second breakfast?"
LOL
I love Middle Earth and Tolkien's writings 🥰
Minute Earth: (asks if I want second breakfast)
Me who ate chips all day and only stopped because it's 6pm and time for dinner: "Yes."
2:30. Uhm yes, I'm always in the mood for a second breakfast.
It can't be a coincidence that I just started reading the hobbit right when this video came out right?
spooky
what does the proportion to the 3 quarter power mean? What does that mean? I dont understand it.
'One small bite is enough to fill the stomach of a grown man'
Pretty sure hobbits consume more calories per day than humans.
"How much did you eat?"
"four"
I don't about the lore of hobbits, but according to the video they don't, they eat far less per day than humans. However they do eat a lot more per day per unit of mass than humans.
"One small bite [of elven bread special enough to be a special parting gift to the fellowship] is enough to fill the stomach of a grown man".
@@nafrost2787 MinuteEarth should make a video about how stupid your comment is
"I don't know about this thing but this video this guy says is wrong says it's this and therefore the video must be true even though I don't know a thing about what they're talking about"
That's in the film. The book doesn't have that scene (and elsewhere it says that one day's rations for a man doing a full day's march is a full wafer of lembas, not just one bite).
That’s actually extremely interesting, I wonder if Tolkien knew exactly this then
Probably made it up but still impressive anyways
On the topic of heat loss, differently for ectothermic animals, sure they also lose heat proportionally but their cells don't produce as much heat so they have way less energy requirements, and let's suppose their environment is somewhere tropical where they don't necessarily need to expend energy to bask or whatever and there isn't much temp variation, do we see disparity on energy consumption between different sizes?
Whenever I go on a cruise ship, I suddenly develop the Hobbitt seven meal plan
Wouldn't this mean that children should also eat seven meals a day?
Children eat bigger meals, I guess... In any case, the energy needs of children should be greater than a hobbit because children are growing much faster and larger than an adult hobbit of the same size.
Yeah this doesn't make sense at all!
And a children half the size of the average adult for sure doesn't weight only 16kg
ideally yes, but because the culture is 3 square meal a day. Teenagers and infants, especially need to eat more often. Sadly high schools don't usually allow snacking during class.
When my growth spurt hit I definitely was eating at least 7 times a day o_o The teachers tried sending me to the principal's for snacking and my mom just blew them off.
humans in general don't need 3 meals a day, out stomach can be trained to let us survive with one meal and two snacks a day, where "meal" is considered a banquet by today's standards. That's why we have the gallbladder, people that have it removed find barely any difference if they eat at the same rate as always, but if you went back to hunter gatherer's or even just romans rhythms, they'd struggle.
So assuming humanoids' culture evolves to make meals just the size to never trigger the gallbladder, hobbits would prefer 7 meals a day while probably being fine with just 2 meals and one snack.
Adoro o senhor dos anéis, já assisti todos os filmes
This channel asking the important questions.
love your vids
keep it up
Can someone explain to me how do you get from 16kg^(3/4) = 8(unit?) to 500c Is the formula missing a constant or something?
The gang over at Shadiversity tried a day of hobbit eating, but did not include the agrarian work load, and their portions were on the large side even so.
They were in various amounts of pain and misery.
Ha, great idea to pack some actual science into such a topic
Why did you change the title and the thubnail?
This was super interesting.
Thank you
1:00 why not clear? is it 1.6*****. there is this specific natural number every plant follows why shouldn't it be that too? 1.(6*?) is very similar to 1.(75)
I have to be frank and honest. I did NOT see that middle-earth pun coming! 😆 😂 🤣
The 7 hobbit meals are a slight exaggeration of the regular meals and snacks that would have been common across England in Tolkien's childhood
Aye, the real point of scaling that gets overlooked when talking about halfling mealtime is the size of the meals - if we assume meal size scales with mass or volume directly (which it should, given the basic mechanics of actually eating), that matters a lot, and this video *does* take that into account, if only implicitly by referencing 'hobbit-sized meals' in the final breakdown, without necessarily clarifying that term.
While an 80 kg man might eat 0.5 kg of food in a large meal, a 16 kg halfling (1/5 the mass) would eat 0.1 kg of food in the same large meal.
Since the halfling needs (1/5)^(3/4) ~= 0.3 times the food as the man, he needs to eat (0.3 / (1/5) ) ~= 1.5 times as many meals
Since we assume the human eats 3 meals and a snack (call it 3.5 meals), that would give us about 5.25 meals for a halfling.
5.25 equivalent meals easily comes out to 4 full meals, 2 snacks, and a light afternoon tea. The specific breakdown is probably mostly cultural, as Shire hobbits seem to enjoy the opportunity to slow down and enjoy things, balanced against the need to get things done in an agrarian setting like the Shire.
I like this particular sponsor Wren
Breakfast,snack,brunch,snack,lunch,snack ,dinner is the food schedule
this was fun bit of world building, love it!
My question is, could a hobbit crush at any food eating contest?
That intro got me good.
That's not Bilbo Baggins, that's his first cousin once removed, Frodo Baggins.
Huh so maybe that’s why Kerbals need so many snacks
Yall act like hobbits and I are completely different diet-wise
It could also be that they produce far more food than they can reasonably store, so they've developed a culture of eating in excess to avoid food spoilage. We don't know how they farm, but they've been working the same land for centuries, and their territory is very large with a comparatively small population. It wouldn't be beyond the pale that their farming practices have just far outproduced their actual need.
What about an adults child, do they need to eat the same amount of food as hobbits do? Do our own meals need to be structured differently as we grow up? Is this why children are always hungry? Is everything I thought I knew about children's eating habits a lie?! What about when they get a growth spurt, do they suddenly need to 'eat more' because of Kliber's law or because they are using up extra energy to well, grow? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!
A sacrifice to the algorithm.
man hobbits are going to be pissed when they hear about brunch
Don't hobbits eat human sized meals though?
They do, the dwarves eat even more than them too, despite being heavier and taller
Pretty sure a Hobbit meal contains more then 500 calories.
Yeah, the meals described before they leave Hobbiton (or Crickhollow) in Fellowship of the Ring were definitely more than 500 calories.
@@bentoth9555 I mean, in terms of what is in them, sure. But wouldn't their plates and pots and overall sizes of food portions be smaller as well? And therefore have less calories?
I can see where your bread is buttered from the intro alone dear Sir🤣
Estou doido para quando isso ser dublado para português
for me i eat vitamins, maybe snack or desert, breakfest, maybe snack or desert, lunch, maybe snack or desert, dinner, maybe snack or desert
I know you were trying to be all cute pointing out metabolic needs and such but the real reason is a reason why is because they are farmers, who would similarly eat about seven small meals.
You get up and have Breakfast
You do the early morning chores, then eat Second Breakfast
More chores, Elevensies
Chores, Lunch
Chores, Afternoon Tea
Finish up daily chores, Dinner
Evening chores, then Supper\
Humans would eat like this in a similar manner if they were a hard working farmer.
You all do realize this means…..
In “the hobbit” the dwarves unintentionally starved poor bilbo
Now we just need the logistics on the silmarils. How did Fëanor actually make them? A new series, secrets of middle-earth explained. Lmao
I think I might be a hobbit 😂
Does this mean that babies and children need to eat relatively more than full sized adults? Also do smaller humans (shorter/thinner) have to eat relatively more than larger ones, or are there other biological factures that are more dominant such that these explanations don't apply to humans of different sizes?
does this mean microscopic animal would pretty much need to eat constantly or they die ? assuming the mass law follow in that scale
Yes! What's for second breakfast please?
I always thought Hobbits ate so many meals a day 'cause they liked to eat. Who doesn't. :-) very interesting video
Shouldnt the energy requirement of a hobbit be greater concidering that brains need a lot of energy. As far as i know Hobbits are of human intelligence, so they should need the same amount of calories
You can choose to eat more, smaller meals during the day regardless of how many calories you need relative to your body weight. This is like asking why small pizzas have fewer slices.
So, lets make Earth Mordor again? That just sounds too cool.
Someone's finally asking the real questions here
1800 calories is starvation level, which you failed to make clear.
wait, if this was true, wouldn't it mean that kids also need to eat 7 times a day? or 10 times? unlike hobbits, kids also need more energy to grow
And they do! Or at least I did. Small early breakfast, second breakfast at school, lunch at school, soup at home, snack, and dinner.
And I always was and still am rather slim.
Well...my sister in law is a kindergarden teacher and she says, healthy, active children do indeed prefer (and do best) with 3 meals and 2 snacks in between. They have a very hard time, bridging the time between main meals, since they do have a high metabolism and also often don't like eating huge portions at once.
And you have to consider, that they usually go to bed straight after dinner - so that's by default the last meal. So 5-6 'meals' of varying sizes is rather the norm for kids.
@@Yorick257 Metabolism varies hugely. There are plenty of fat kids who likely eat less.
I’d say I doubt that Tolkien put that much thought into his world, but then I remember that this man made a world to justify his language creation hobby
Me, creating a world to justify my "create specie and imagine genetics" hobby : ... I could have helped him if we were born in the same period XD
Did they change the title of the video?!
lets look at that makreel with potato diner round about 400 calories and that was one meal. bilbo and Frodo were more active an less gullotones members of the hobbit species so they mostlikly eat more like humans one or three times and a snack. and a hobbit must weigth atleast around 30 kg and is about 1,2 meters high
There was a whole lot of walking in those 6 movies.
1:30 That movie, Honey I Shrunk the Kids" is just wrong. If you shrunk a human to the size of a mouse that person would die of hypothermia almost right away, even if it was a hot day. The heat would just leave their body way to fast.
Of the 7 meals, only 3 are full meals, 3 are light meals, and 1 is a snack.
Well this is nice minute earth video