Three times a day, every day
Eating is the one appointment almost nobody misses. Three meals a day, plus snacks, plus the occasional feast, adds up to tens of thousands of sittings at the table by middle age. Each one is unremarkable, but together they are a big part of what a life is made of: family dinners, rushed breakfasts, lunches at a desk, meals with friends. The tower above stacks one plate for every meal you have eaten, at about two centimetres a plate, and puts it next to some famous buildings for scale.
Change the sliders to match how you actually eat. If you often skip breakfast, set two meals a day; if you graze, add snacks. The breakdown underneath shows how many breakfasts, lunches and dinners make up your total.
How we calculate it
We start counting from your first birthday, by which time most children eat regular meals. From then on we multiply the days you have lived by the meals you set. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are split evenly from the daily number, so two meals a day counts lunch and dinner, and four or five adds extra meals. For the plate tower we multiply the meal count by two centimetres. Snacks are shown separately and are not stacked.
| Building | Height | Meals to reach it at 2 cm a plate |
|---|---|---|
| Big Ben (Elizabeth Tower) | 96 m | 4,800 |
| Eiffel Tower | 330 m | 16,500 |
| Empire State Building (roof) | 381 m | 19,050 |
| Burj Khalifa | 828 m | 41,400 |
Worked example. A 36-year-old who eats three meals a day has had about 12,985 days of meals since their first birthday, so roughly 39,000 meals: 13,000 each of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Their plate tower would stand about 780 metres tall, more than twice the height of the Eiffel Tower and close to the Burj Khalifa.
Making meals count
Seen as a number, meals are a reminder of how many chances there are to eat well and to eat together. Researchers who study wellbeing often point to shared meals as one of the simple habits linked with feeling connected. With around a thousand dinners a year, even one extra meal with friends or family each week adds up to fifty-two good evenings.
Questions people ask
Do snacks count as meals?
Not in the main total, but you can add them with the snacks slider and they appear in the breakdown. Many people eat one or two snacks a day without thinking of them as meals.
How do you count meals for babies?
Babies feed many times a day, so instead of guessing we start the count at age one, when most children are eating three meals a day.
How tall would a stack of my plates really be?
We assume a dinner plate is about 2 cm thick, so 50 meals make a metre. Real plates vary, but the stack gets very tall either way.
How much food does a person eat in a lifetime?
Estimates commonly land somewhere between 25 and 50 tonnes over a long life, depending on diet and how drinks are counted.
Sources. Building heights from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat; lifetime food estimates from popular nutrition references. Calculations run in your browser; nothing you enter is sent anywhere.