Gaston’s breakfast routine and Beauty and
the Beast gives us one of the single most iconic Disney lyrics of all time. I mean, just
listen to this. How could it not be iconic? Gaston, buddy, we need to talk about
the benefits of a balanced breakfast. But here's the thing. Not only are his
morning gains giving him a cholesterol level that could kill a tank, his diet
is also throwing the town around him into crisis. Don’t believe me? It's a
tale as old as time, economic crash. Hello Internet! Welcome to Food Theory, the show
that never counts its chickens before they hatch. Today we're revisiting the Disney
classic that just keeps on giving us Film and Food Theories: Beauty and the Beast.
A story that likely needs no introduction. Smart, rural French girl wishes for more in her
life, winds up in a curved castle with talking toilets and an extra hairy prince. Singing
and Stockholm Syndrome ensue. But it's the drama going on outside of The Beast's
castle that I want to focus on today. You see, Belle’s constantly being pursued by the
village hunk Gaston, a man who believes that a woman's place is cooking in the kitchen
and not reading books. At this point, it's pretty clear who the bad guy is meant to be,
and who says that movies weren't “woke” back in the nineties? Outside of that one character
trait, though, when push comes to shove, Gaston is really not as bad as the movie makes
him out to be. When he learns that Belle is trapped in the castle, imprisoned by a giant,
hulking beast, he gathers up the villagers to… And can you blame him? His intended fiance just
got abducted by the giant honey badger that lives out in the woods on the outskirts
of town. What other options are there? Sitting down and talking about your feelings?
Anyway I'm not here to be a Gaston apologist. Instead, I'm here to focus on the villainy that he
presents to the village that he calls home. In his villain song, the self-titled Gaston. Everyone
sings in the bar about how great this guy is. And it's at this point that we get the
rundown of his essential life stats, his spitting habits, and his
breakfast routine. The whole four dozen and five dozen egg bit. Just
let that statistic sink in for a minute. Five dozen eggs every morning. That is 60 eggs
a day, a whopping 21,900 eggs in a single year. For comparison, a typical person in the
U.S. is eating around 288 eggs per year, meaning that Gaston is consuming
nearly 100 times that amount. So with the current global egg shortage in
headlines right now, I wanted to take a look into Gaston's incredible edible egg habits.
Is it possible to consume that many eggs? How many chickens would this village need in
order to sustain Gaston's breakfast binges? And most importantly of all, what are the
downstream ramifications of someone eating up, both literally and figuratively, the
entire supply of this shelled staple? We've got ourselves one egg-cellent episode,
friends. So let's get to cracking, shall we? First, let's start off with an easy question.
Is it possible to eat 60 eggs in a single day? Now most online blogs will say that the average
adult human stomach can expand to hold at max one quart of food or about 950 milliliters. I've
checked the sources that these blogs tend to cite, though, and I don't really love
the research that they've done. I much prefer this video right here from the
absolute excellent channel, Institute of Human Anatomy, where we actually see him testing out
a normal human stomach. And at peak capacity, it holds significantly less; a mere
600 milliliters or about 1.2 pints. Basically, the human stomach is the perfect
size for a full Ben and Jerry's tub. It's like a match made in heaven. Now a small egg holds
about 1.5 fluid ounces or 44 milliliters. So if Gaston were to eat these raw, he'd be sitting
at around 2640 milliliters of fluid in there, four times what a stomach typically holds. By
the 14th egg, he'd practically be at capacity and he still has 46 to go. Gaston's
stomach would likely burst. Notice, though, that I said “likely”. Because
60 eggs in a sitting has been done. In fact, 100 eggs in a single sitting
has been done before. Back in 2013, world famous competitive eater Joey Chestnut set a new world record for egg eating
by consuming, get this, 141 eggs. Even crazier. Joey did it in 8 minutes.
So while every bone in my body wants to see that Gaston would be dead before the
movie even begins. Maybe this barge of a man comes with an extra large fuel tank.
Is that? Is that right terminology there? What do you call the gas tank of a barge?
Large boat, fuel tank. Oil tank. Yeah, that makes sense. I wasn't that far off.
So let's just say the Gaston has himself an above average stomach. But
if he could eat that many eggs, can we calculate the number of chickens required
to fulfill Gaston's insatiable appetite? As we see in the movie, the chickens seem to
roam freely around the village. So doing some quick research. A modern chicken in a backyard
environment can lay four eggs a week on average, or about 208 eggs in a year. To
supply our Gaston with nearly 22,000 eggs in a single year, you're talking about
105 chickens performing at peak capacity. Simple, right? This is like the easiest Food
Theory that I've done all year. Well, not so fast. As I've learned from a decade of
doing these theories. It is never that easy. The egg production varies from breed to breed,
so we need to know what type of chicken is laying these eggs in the first place. In other words,
we need to figure out the geographic location for this poor provincial town.We know that
this is France based on the opening song. They make that one pretty darn obvious. But where in
France specifically? Someone call the Geoguessrs. Although the village never gets itself an official
name, the creative team has gone on record to say the design was inspired by two specific towns in
the Alsace region of France, two specific towns whose names make me break out into a cold sweat.
No way I'm going to be able to pronounce these. I mean, the Australian Macas incident was bad
enough. Oh, let's do our best. Okay. It’s French. So you're going to fuse some of these letters
together. You’re going to align some of these other ones. rei-queir and ri-boov-oulle (I tried)…
Nailed it! Anyway, both Riquewihr and Ribeauville
are in the northeastern region of France, so we can safely assume that that's roughly where
we're talking about for Beauty and the Beast. That said, we're not done. Of course, it's
not that easy. Different chickens started being farmed in this area of France at
different times, meaning it's not just enough to know the location of the movie.
We also need to know the time period. Luckily, there are a few things that give us
a rough idea of when the movie takes place, and most of them come from *sigh* the live action
remake. Hey, If they had to do it, at least there's a silver lining in there somewhere. In
the remake, they added this completely unnecessary scene where Belle uses an enchanted book to
travel to her old home in Paris. It's here that the beast sees a doctor's mask and suspects that
Belle's mother might have died from “the plague”. This is most likely referring to the Plague
of Provence, which took place between 1720 and 1722. In this scene, we see Belle as
a baby. Now, according to the animation supervisor for the original movie, Belle is
in her twenties when the movie takes place. Therefore, the events of this film must
happen sometime around 1740. This also lines up nicely with when the original
fairy tale the movie is based on was published 1740. We also know for a fact that
the movie had to have happened before 1789. That marked the beginning
of the French Revolution, a time when most of the French nobility had
fled France in fear for their lives. But the final piece of evidence that really cements
this as the mid 1700s is Cogsworth's tour the castle. It's here that he draws
Belle's attention to the ceiling as We hear it mentioned again in the
Christmas special when the decorator, Angelique, calls the place. Baroque architecture was
characterized by its ornate detail, lots of rich heavy designs
with arcs and curves and marble. So him calling it a baroque atrocity tells
us that the castle has gone out of date. And wouldn't you know it? But the baroque
style lasted in Europe from the early 17th century and really started to
fade in popularity by the 1750s, perfectly matching our rough estimate
of 1740 as the date for this movie. Why were we talking about the history of European
architecture again? Oh yeah. Chickens. That's right. That's right. Lost track for a second
there. This one's going in all different directions. So knowing the history of Baroque
architecture in the northeastern provinces of France is going to help us narrow down our
chicken breeds and egg production rates. How ridiculous is that? If this channel
does not deserve a subscription from you, I don't know what does. Seriously, who else is
going to such absurd lengths to get these answers, although they’re answers that aren't asked
for in the first place. So I guess we only have ourselves to blame. So the first thing
that I wanted to do was to see if there were any chickens that had a similar look to the design
of the chickens that we see in the movie itself. See, right here in the opening song, we get these
brownish red chickens. Those didn't exist in France during the 1740s. Most brown chickens, such
as the Rhode Island Red Chicken and Red Leghorn, only came around in the 1800s and onwards, a
whole century after the events of the movie. So now you can understand why it
was so important for us to analyze the architecture of the castle. So since
the chickens that we see in the movie are just clearly meant to be stand-in generic
chickens and not historically accurate. I narrowed our field down to three
ancient French breeds of egg laying chicken that pre-date the mid-18th
century that gave me the Houdan, the Bresse Gauloise and La Fleche. These
chickens lay an average of three eggs per week between March and October, but
yet again, it's not as simple as that. You see, egg laying stats like these
are based on modern data with a modern understanding of how chickens produce
eggs. Nowadays, farmers understand that a chicken's egg cycle relies on sunlight,
a chicken needs approximately 14 hours of daylight to stimulate the pituitary
gland so its ovaries release an egg. This means that in the winter, when the sun
is not out for as long, chickens produce fewer eggs. Modern farmers can simulate sunlight in
order for their chickens to meet that 14 hour requirement. But in the 18th century, they
didn't have that level of sophistication. This tells us that annual total egg
production back then would have been less. If we look at a single chicken, it would
lay three eggs a week from March to October, thereby giving us 96 eggs. Then, if we look at how
daylight reduces to 8 hours in the other months, egg production slows down to two eggs per week or
32 eggs between November and February. In short, one chicken in this provincial town
is laying 128 eggs per year. And this is all assuming that the chickens are in
their prime egg laying years and that no one's getting eaten by those evil wolves that
just happen to live on the outskirts of town. Those things are legitimately the scariest
part of this movie. If Gaston really wants the beast to kill, he should just go after those
guys. So with all this information gathered, the grand total of chickens needed
to satisfy Gaston's protein fix is. *eggroll* 195 chickens! 195. Seems like a lot for a town
that actively calls itself little. We can quickly count from some of the shots in the first song
that this is a town of about a hundred people, which means that there are almost two
chickens for every person in the village. To put that in perspective,
a village of this size should only need 50 chickens to meet its needs.
But here the ratio is actually flipped: Instead of one chicken for every two
people, there are two chickens for every one person. And all of those chickens are
working overtime to sustain just one dude. It doesn't even cover the needs of
the rest of the village. And you see, that last point there is kind of
a big deal. In the opening song we hear a random line in the lyrics where this
woman is screaming that she needs six eggs. On my first watch. I thought that this was
because she was holding so many children. But I see now that it's actually far
worse than that. She's screaming that she needs six eggs because there
just aren't any eggs available. Gaston is eating the entire supply and
that's trickling down to all the other peasants in the village. What are you going
to do if there's an egg shortage? Well, we see it right now in the grocery stores.
You sell your eggs at a higher price. It's called the law of supply and demand. If the
supply goes down but the demand remains the same, that price is going to rise. This then
creates a domino effect for the rest of the town. We see the baker with his tray
like always, he's going to need eggs in order to bake the food that he sells. If eggs
have suddenly become more expensive for him, he's just going to adjust his prices to cover
his costs and so on and so on for everyone else in the town, regardless of whatever services
they provide, like the butcher or the barber, they'll all have to raise their prices in order
to buy the more expensive food. And if you think I'm overthinking this, if you think that I'm
completely wrong to be talking about the economic ramifications of one dude over consuming eggs in
a small, provincial French town in a Disney movie, think again. Right here in the opening song,
there's another random lyric thrown in. Clearly there are some financial
issues that are happening in this town, and now we know exactly who's to blame. Gaston's
egg-centric diet has created an economic crisis. He alone is the reason for the town's prices
going up. And no one seems to notice. I mean, after all, he's the local hero. But
feeding this local jock is costing them all big time. The villagers
desperately need Gaston to either cut down on his egg consumption or
just get out of the picture entirely. Ha, I guess some things just
work out on their own. But hey, you know what Food isn't going to be causing
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