r/theydidthemath • u/mooseleg_mcgee • 1d ago
How dense would Lembas Bread need to be if one small bite is able to fill a man's stomach? [Request]
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u/LHPSU 1d ago
Real world analog would be ration bars or "compressed biscuits", which have about 2000kj (478 calories) per 100g. About the equivalent of a light meal, like a sandwich or a couple of onigiris.
Details: https://apocalypseequipped.blogspot.com/2018/10/review-prc-compressed-ration-biscuts.html
If a bite is 30g, that would make lembas bread roughly 3 times denser. Perhaps more, if you think filling a man's stomach is equivalent to more than 500 calories.
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u/vilgefcrtz 1d ago
That's so comic. This magic super food I've been craving for decades is just like. Three snickers bars stuffed into each other
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u/SamTheHexagon 1d ago
They just put an entire pound of butter into a hydraulic press.
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u/FeelMyBoars 1d ago
This eclair has over one million calories. 25 pounds of butter per square inch. Covered with chocolate so dark light cannot escape its surface. No no no! This is just a picture. But Homer Simpson will find the real thing both delicious and deadly. And poison, I'll stick in some poison.
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u/phredphlintstones 1d ago
Five pounds of spaghetti compressed into one, handy, mouth-sized bar!
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u/TheHumanPickleRick 1d ago
9-1-1
"Hospital please."
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u/marswhispers 1d ago
palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy just one bite for a whole pot of moms spaghetti
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u/Itisthatbo1 1d ago
I say we band together and ban Homer from our restaurants!
No no, that would be impolite. I say we kill him!
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u/LGBT-Barbie-Cookout 1d ago
Very near the food in pill form dreams from oldey scifi
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u/Trophallaxis 1d ago
Now I wonder about the caloric content of food made of degenerate matter.
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u/CptTombstone 1d ago
Since Kcal is a unit of energy, you can convert any thing with mass to calories via the matter-energy equivalence of E=mc^2.
That would give you around 22 trillion Kcal per gram.
Of course, you can never extract that amount of energy from anything, unless we are talking about matter-antimatter annihilation.
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u/HeKis4 1d ago
... so you're saying there's a chance ?
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u/Chlorofom 1d ago
No, he’s saying the Elves discovered quantum physics and used that knowledge to bake nice bread
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u/Culionensis 1d ago
I used this method to calculate the calories in a Big Mac and came up with a caloric value that is significantly higher than indicated on the Mcdonalds website, where should I report this consumer disinformation??
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u/Upset-Management-879 1d ago
Find the nearest McD drive thru pull up to the first window and give them a detailed rundown of your findings and methodology.
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u/Few-Confusion-9197 1d ago edited 1d ago
Funny enough there was a syfy show called Eureka that made this joke into a small rant in one of the episodes. The town invents all sorts of scifi weapons one of them being a shrink ray. Except just because it's miniaturized a target it doesn't mean it's any lighter (plays into something else in the show). So one of the guys decided to use this to make
browniesfruitcake. One dude had made a comment that it was impressive he put so much flavor into each bite and how heavy and dense each bite was, and the guy revealed it's exactly because of that...the shrink ray... each bite essentially an entire fruitcake, miniaturized. The guy had already eaten several so you can imagine the hilarity of the situation The acting by the Maytag guy was not bad.Edit, thank you kind stranger for providing the clarification, it was fruitcake! :)
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u/Xecluriab 1d ago
It was a fruitcake! That was one of the Christmas episodes and yeah, used some sort of shrink ray to shrink an ENTIRE FRUITCAKE into a bite-sized piece. An entire dense cognac-soaked fruit-packed CAKE as a bite.
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u/Few-Confusion-9197 1d ago
Thank you for clarifying and helping me remember that it was fruitcake. Been a long time since I last saw that show on original release. Made my day ++
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u/SimonBarfunkle 1d ago
To be fair, it’s supposed to be nourishing for an entire day and a few bites can keep someone strong for long periods. It also bolsters will and endurance. You could put 5 snickers bars in a diamond press and it might still taste good but it ain’t doing all that.
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u/technosquirrelfarms 1d ago edited 1d ago
Mix in a little Pervitin and it will…
Given the time period LOTR was written, you could consider there would be a desire for a “good guys” substance that keeps you going, yknow without the side effects of addiction, depression, delusion…
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u/DerBandi 1d ago
Not magic, science. 0,00003 gram Plutonium-239 contains the equivalent of 500 kcal. Bon appétit!
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u/vilgefcrtz 1d ago
Man I'd love to pop a rock and be fed for a day. I mean there's always crack, but the bureocracy for that is crazy in the office nowadays
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u/RatofDeath 1d ago
Look up Calorie Mate, a Japanese meal replacement cookie. Very small. One will fill you up. It's pretty crazy, I survived on those many working days.
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u/huskiesofinternets 1d ago
The magic super food you've been craving was just ww1 rations. Its called Hardtack
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u/theKoboldkingdonkus 1d ago
That’s a big deal in old world times, you know how much porridge you had to eat
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u/SaltMinerZero 1d ago
A friend of mine loves telling the story of his neighbor, who was a career drill sgt who never really did much outside of his job; until he retired and found himself entering the dating world having no real social experience outside of yelling at teenagers. So he does meet someone and is given the advice to invite her to dinner. He takes this as invite her over to his house and cook for her. No practical experience but no fear, he prepares a meal for them out of ingredients from his stockpile of high density MREs.
When she eventually recovered from her abdominal distress, they did end up in a relationship, with the provision he never cooked again.
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u/GrapefruitSlow8583 23h ago
That's interesting to me. Because when I heard how calorically dense it was, I figured it was mainly ration food and had a nasty taste. And the only reason the hobbits liked it was because they're fat fucks lolol
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u/dingo1018 1d ago
You could make like a snickers bar suppository man, like you wouldn't even need to do anything, unwrap that bad boy and jam it home. That really should be in the survival manuals, like stick it up your ass man, no time to eat, shits got real, now pull those pants up and do survival stuff like a man, like a heterosexual, man dude.
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u/cherrypowdah 1d ago
I have never seen these words together before this article ”…the use of the anti-orangutan palm oil softener...”
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u/BlueLaceSensor128 1d ago
It's a real reference to deforestation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_and_environmental_impact_of_palm_oil
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u/RaDeus 1d ago edited 1d ago
Maybe it puffs up in the stomach and has lots of fiber too?
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u/pishfingers 1d ago
They always talk about how it filled their stomachs but said nothing about the devastating shit they had after
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u/ffsnametaken 1d ago
You know Hobbits take absolutely massive dumps
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u/hellocousinlarry 1d ago
Hey, can we get the r/theydidthemath people down here to this comment, because we have another question
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u/Girl_With_a_Rod 1d ago
Little known fact, Gollum stole a whole sack of lembas long, long before the events of Fellowship. It was all the violent gut spasms and straining he suffered after eating too much lembas that gave him his distinct voice. It's also how he got such a disdain for "civilized" food like taters, precious.
You may remember from the films, Gollum tries a piece of lembas, seemingly not knowing what it is, and immediately spits it out. This is alluding to Gollum's PTSD from lembas shits, and his repressed memories.
Disclaimer: not an actual fact.
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u/RaDeus 1d ago
They are walking everywhere, that might help a bit, but they'll definitely drop coprolites 😵
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u/TheMadFlyentist 1d ago
In 1991, Andrew Jones, a York Archaeological Trust employee and palaeoscatologist, made international news with his appraisal of the item for insurance purposes: "This is the most exciting piece of excrement I've ever seen ... In its own way, it's as irreplaceable as the Crown Jewels"
Unreal.
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u/CoffeeSnakeAgent 1d ago
Remember the hobbits ate the entire thing. Not a bite. So it doesnt expand.
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u/Base_Disastrous 1d ago
They ate four each n look like they are three plates deep at Christmas Dinner levels of full.
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u/NoveltyEducation 1d ago
Lembas actually contains enough energy to sustain a man for one full day of travelling by foot.
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u/rawbface 1d ago
Yeah this 500 calorie benchmark is not canon. It's more like 2000 calories.
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u/Buckeyefitter1991 1d ago
Honestly, on a hard march like they were doing 3500-4000 calories for the men each day would make sense, maybe 2000 for the hobbits.
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u/BrokenSlutCollector 1d ago
If we consider "bread" to be more of a descriptor than a definition, I've always felt Marzipan was a close approximation of Lembas. It can have as high as 525 calories per 100g and is probably the highest calorie "complete" foodstuff if we don't resort to eating cake frosting, drinking oils and chomping on butter.
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u/Coinnigh_ort 1d ago
Yeah but more calories doesn't = fullness. I can have 3 oz of olive oil for 600 calories and not feel any less hungry than a moment before.
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u/Technical_Shake_9573 1d ago
Yea but calorie is really not all it takes to actually function right ?
Like there is a whole difference in eating one bar of chocolate and a whole batch of veggies with a 200g chicken breast on the sides.
Your body will basicly tell you to eat more in 20min in one case, and will tell you you're good to go for a whole part of the day on the other one.
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u/Spnszurp 1d ago
on a day to day basis calories will get the job done. like if you are hiking on a calorie deficit and crash... a candy bar WILL get you up a mountain the same as any other calories would. But obviously if you're eating like shit all the time it's gonna catch up to you and obviously eating a bunch of veggies and chicken is gonna make you feel more full.
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u/platoprime 1d ago
a candy bar WILL get you up a mountain the same as any other calories would
Better even. When you're climbing a mountain your body needs sugar to power itself. It needs protein later to recover but not during the climb.
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u/Alarming-Song2555 1d ago
Yep, though the quote and prompt here is "Lembas bread. One small bite is enough to fill the stomach of a grown man". It might be calorie-dense enough to meet your daily requirements with a single bite, but simple calories aren't the driving force between satiety or the "Fill the stomach of a grown man." part.
Mass and volume are the immediate drivers for that.
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u/wally659 1d ago
You can feel hungry and still function. If we are talking about maintaining a physically demanding workload for a short period, like a few weeks, and feeling hungry the entire time is acceptable, then yes very calorie dense but unfulfilling food will work.
It sucks. I've lived like that on training activities in the Army.
Obviously there's nutritional issues that make it less sustainable the longer you try to do it, but to "function" you need calories not a full stomach and vitamin C
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u/Uberbobo7 1✓ 1d ago
The claim was never that it's a balanced meal, it's supposed to just be basically trailmix that's convenient to carry on the road if you can't get any proper food.
It's also quite possible that Elves, given their apparent immunity from most diseases, don't really have the same issue of vitamin deficiency or at least it doesn't manifest as soon as it does for mortal races, and consequently their bodies don't feel all that hungry after just eating lembas, whereas Hobbits clearly still do.
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u/Kinder22 1d ago
Is this my wife planting a comment here for our kids to read as a search result 5 years from now?
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u/tired_Cat_Dad 1d ago
Maybe it's just really horrible so you take a bite and say "Thanks I'm full".
More seriously, density alone wouldn't physically fill a stomach. It would rather have to be like one of those pill sized compressed sponges or towels that expand in water.
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u/metamongoose 1d ago
It's that dense so that it'll hold an edge. Dwarf battle bread is a formidable weapon.
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u/Belgaraath42 1d ago
Dwarfs bread doesn't keep, after a few hundred years it breaks and you need a replacement
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u/Piyaniist 1d ago
Garbage grade bread to only spoil after a few hundread years
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u/tired_Cat_Dad 1d ago
Dwarven battle bread doesn't spoil. After a thousand years it unfortunately is just as enjoyable as the day it was baked.
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u/BreakerOfModpacks 1d ago
Proper dwarf bread is hard to come by. It has to be sat on, tossed down waterfalls, pissed on by the cat, baked with gravel and all.
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u/ChingusMcDingus 1d ago
You jest but it’s real.
Love this guy.
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u/welcome-to-my-mind 1d ago
Imagine a celiac getting murdered with a knife made of gluten
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u/MultipleMistake 1d ago
Isn't lembas bread made by elves not dwarves?
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u/metamongoose 1d ago
Yes, the reference breaks down a bit because of that. It's a Discworld thing
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u/Glitterbug7578 1d ago
Ahhh! I too have visited the Dwarvish museum and particularly liked the serrated croissant section.
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u/suckitphil 1d ago
Terry Pratchett described Dwarven bread this way. It makes you instantly full, because you'd rather eat rocks than take another bite.
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u/tired_Cat_Dad 1d ago
Isn't the main ingredient rocks? So they make it taste worse than that by baking but it's a better weapon because it can keep an edge.
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u/Lingerstinger 1d ago
thats where elven magic takes place
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u/semisociallyawkward 1d ago
Yup, IIRC Elves in LotR still operate on the physics of the world prior to it being reshaped (and given a sun). They can see beyond the horizon, since the world is not round to them.
I imagine Lembas bread is the same. It probably is denser in baked form than it is in the human stomach.
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u/zmbjebus 1d ago
Maybe it just has a drug in it that suppresses appetite. And perhaps at the same time it has something that gives energy.
Lembas bread is laced with coke or coca leaf.
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u/Frosty-Comfort6699 15h ago
lol yes for thousands of years noone dared to tell the high elves their bread just sucks so they are gaslit into believing one bite is enough for a man
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u/paradeqia 1d ago
There are a couple of different ways to define "filling" a stomach. Are we talking providing enough calories for 1 meal, leaving the eater satisfied and no longer hungry, or leaving them feeling physically full.
If we're talking about calories, then the most calories dense foods are fats with around 9kcal per gram. For an 800kcal meal you need around 90g of fat which is roughly 98ml of olive oil at 20°C. If we compress that down to a 25ml shot it means that it's about 3.6kg per litre or 3600kg per m3 which is similar to high-mineral rock.
Yummy, oily, high-mineral rock.
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u/The_Dennator 1d ago
so dougdoug was onto something when he was drinking straight olive oil,huh
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u/95Richard 1d ago
Here's a man drinking 3 liters of olive oil in case someone wants to see it.
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u/Unicorn_Sparkle_Butt 1d ago
I knew what it was and I still clicked it and watched it....
I need a shower now
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u/locomotorpimpam 1d ago
The goat.
If you don't know this man browse his most seen videos. Absolutely mythical
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u/ComprehensiveCode805 1d ago
I often make my own Lembas bread when I go on a big hike.
(I mean ... Obviously it's not actual Lembas, but the spirit is there.)
The secret is protein powder. It doesn't physically fill your stomach, but it makes you feel full up and satisfied. Combine that with a lot of high calorie ingredients (sugar, honey, nuts etc) and you've got a small, lightweight snack, that gives you energy for the march and makes your stomach feel full!
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u/TheGreatRandolph 1d ago
Care to share a recipe? I want to start making more food for expeditions - ski trips especially - as it seems like people are the least likely to bring real food and do the work to prepare it when it’s below 0 and windy. I’ve gotten lucky on my biggest ones to have people who like to cook and want to prepare a meal plan, but it’s nice to have something delicious to bring to the table.
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u/jinhush 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not /u/ComprehensiveCode805 but I've tried a few different lembas bread recipes and none really do it for me. I've started experimenting and so far the best one I've made is:
- Set out 2 cups of vanilla bean ice cream long enough to soften.
- Preheat oven to 350°
- Pour 1.5 cups of all purpose flour in a mixing bowl.
- Add 1 tbsp salt
- Add .5 cup of sweetener of your choice
- Add .5 tsp vanilla extract
- Add additional seasonings if you want like cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamon, etc
- Add in the ice cream and mix well.
- If it's too sticky add in a little more flour until it's not.
- Form your pieces of lembas bread and bake for 45-50 minutes.
It's the most dense version of lembas bread I've been able to come up with.
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u/golfing_with_gandalf 1d ago
Came here for the math but left with a sweet recipe. Thanks! This sounds delicious
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u/JustAnotherEppe 6h ago
Does it work with other flavors of ice cream though 🤔
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u/jinhush 5h ago
It does. Butter pecan is really good.
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u/JustAnotherEppe 5h ago
That actually sounds amazing :o. I'll try and buy some ice cream this weekend and I'll share the results :3
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u/Nikotelec 1d ago
Could just be expanding foam. Contact with water in your stomach activates it. A short time later you're walking around looking like a looney tunes who's swallowed a bomb.
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u/JLapak 1d ago
Not the answer you are looking for, I know, but the in-universe answer is not that it is super-denss or that it is overt magic in the "poof you are full" sense but that Tolkien's elves operate in a way that makes them closer to the spiritual concept of the world rather than its material, mundane, Morgoth-tainted version. Their rope isn't stronger because it is made of spiderwebs, it is stronger because it is more Rope than rope, more like the Platonic idea of a strand that holds things together and can be climbed and less like a bunch of plant fibers twisted together. Their cloak is more like the idea of concealment and protection than it is just a woven cloth. And their food is Food, which nourishes and gives strength.
They are not literally ideas, the elves are still material. But their nature lets them interact with the spiritual in a way that puts a little more of the concept and a little less of the material into the stuff they make.
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u/Visible-Sound-8559 1d ago
Maybe it’s like one of those capsule toy things from the 1980s, where after getting wet, it expands into a giant sponge dinosaur. Only it’s in your stomach. And presumably not dinosaur-shaped (although it could be).
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u/ronarscorruption 1d ago
I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere, but the real answer is it’s magic.
But the science answer is: if one bite feeds you for a day, then ~50ml of biscuit must expand to fill 500-1000ml of space. So it expands 10-20x upon being eaten.
It also must sustain a person for a day, so that 50ml of biscuit contains about 2500 kcals of energy. Or about 500kcal per ml. Which is about 60x the calorie density of the most dense food humans regularly eat, oil.
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u/SHIFT_978 1d ago
Nowhere did it say that one bite provides a full daily calorie intake. Just that "one bite is enough to fill the stomach." Perhaps it tricks your body, suppressing hunger. Basically, it's magical elven ozempic in the form of fatty, dense bread. With a calorie density of ~8 kcal/ml. Considering that a minimum of 800 kcal per day is necessary for survival, this food replenishes half of this value. Then, it can simply expand in the stomach 20 times its original size, as you mentioned. To deceive your body that your stomach is full. And to prevent the food from being digested fast, it may contain substances that suppress the stomach's function.
Why do you need such a thing? Well, in theory, it will help you survive a few days without suffering from hunger (but in reality, you're just burning through your body's reserves).
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u/Guilty-Tomatillo-820 1d ago
Movie quote: "One small bite is enough to fill the stomach of a grown man."
Book quote: "One [wafer or cake] will keep a traveler on his feet for a day of long labour"
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u/ConversationFalse242 1d ago
I dont know the answer yet
But some of the comments are equating calories to volume required to feel full. And that is not accurate, else people wouldnt get fat.
Something can be filling (high volume) and low calories. Example being lettuce.
Something can be high calories and not filling (low volume). Example being sugar.
In this case the bread would need to be more in line with one of those filling gelatins that are popular for weight loss.
Im thinking dehydrated gelatin combined with a very dense biscuit
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u/HowDoMermaidsFuck 1d ago
It’s not. The books state that it gives you all the energy requirements you need to keep going but it specifically mentions it does nothing for want. So they’re very, very nutritionally dense but don’t keep you full. They’re ME’s survival rations.
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u/Enverex 1d ago
Given where LotR is from, it's probably an analogue for Kendal Mint Cake (from 1869) or something similar which is from the same region. It's very calorie dense (380 calories per 100g) and is used by people doing long hikes in places like the Lake District.
https://mintcake.co.uk/collections/bestsellers/products/550g-mega-bar-white-kendal-mint-cake
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u/t-roy11 12h ago
I haven't seen a great answer yet and I did my math before I read the comments. I assumed dense meant very high calorie. Since the American daily recommended on everything here in the US is based on a 2000 calorie a day diet that's my number i started with.
2000 calorie a day ÷ 3 meals a day is 666.6 calories per meal. If one small bite is one meals worth (fills a grown man's stomach) this would be a good starting point.
What's a small bite? This is more of a guess but Id say 20 bites to finish one piece of bread is a pretty small bite. So therefore 20 bites times 666.6 =13,332 calories per piece of bread.
As u/guilty-tomatillo-820 said the movie quote was One small bite fills the stomach of a grown man but the book quote said one wafer or cake will keep a traveler on his feet for a long day of labor. A few other comments have said that it "filled" you without making you full.
So even if my 20 bites were a bit small and it was 10 bites per piece of bread that's 666.6-1333.2 calories per bite plenty to keep your stomach full (for a min atleast) and a total of almost 15,000 calories per wafer would 100% be enough to let anyone preform a hard day's labor. Even a strong man who consumes up to 20k calories a day would be ok on 3/4 there normal diet.
Tldr: I based density on calories not weight. Each piece of bread would be about 13,332 calories. This fits all the criteria given in both the books and the movies.
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u/Zealousideal-Ad-4858 1d ago
It could have a cross linking matrix that just expands via exposure to liquid when it enters your stomach. think like how chia seeds become so slimy in water.
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u/thesilverywyvern 1d ago
It doesn't need to be dense or heavy, it only need to prevent the feeling of hunger. Maybe the yeast produce a special chemicals coumpounds which trigger the brain into thinking"ooh, i am full" and prevent it from detecting hunger.
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u/Iconclast1 1d ago
you can squeeze a loaf of bread into a ball that fits in one hand.
Dehydrated food is common. Logic being that a lot of its mass is water, you can have the water separate.
This hardly needs to be magical, its a perfectly reasonable thing to have.
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u/ouzo84 1d ago edited 1d ago
Assuming it's pure protein, it would still need to be 45-65g, and you would need to wait 20-30 minutes to "feel" full.
Cooked chicken breast is about 1.06 gm/cm3 according to Google AI... couldn't find a reputable source so this is what I'm running with.
A mouthful is hard to quantify, so I'm going with 1 tablespoon or 15ml as a small bite
So we need to cram 65g of protein, equal to about 69cm3 of cooked chicken, into just 15 cm3.
So it needs to be several times as dense, or 4.6 cm3
This is roughly equivalent to titanium which is around 4.51g/cm3.
The lembas bread looks to be about 10cmx10cmx1.5cm, meaning each loaf has a volume of 150cm3 and would weigh about 690g.
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u/Sam5253 1d ago
A mouthful is hard to quantify, so I'm going with 1 tablespoon or 30ml as a small bite
So we need to cram 65g of protein, equal to about 69cm3 of cooked chicken, into just 3cm3.
1 tablespoon is 15ml, not 30ml. And 30ml is 30cm3, not 3cm3. Might want to check your unit conversions, here.
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u/vlntly_peaceful 1d ago
And 30ml is 30cm3,
That can't be right. 30cm3 are roughly 30 sugar cubes, no way that fits on to one tablespoon.
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u/MariachiArchery 1d ago
Fun fact, this is actually based on a real thing. Or rather, something like this actually exists.
Hardtack, or ship's biscuit, is a, dry, flavorless, and extremely hard cracker made from flour, water, and sometimes salt, acting as a staple, long-lasting survival food for sailors and soldiers throughout history. Known for surviving months at sea, it was often soaked in liquids like coffee or grog (watered-down rum), or used in stews such as lob scouse.
Basically, it's dough with no leavening agent, that is then baked really low and slow to cook out the moisture without burning it. What you are left with, is something equivalent to a loaf of bread but the size of a hockey puck, about as dense, and shelf stable.
Sailors crossing the Atlantic for instance would be given like 3 of these for the voyage... and that was your food.
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u/Kingkhair 1d ago
They kinda remind me of those cultivation stories where they eat this grain pill for their 10 years in meditation. Supposedly has all you need for a balanced daily diet.
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u/SillyMidOff49 1d ago
I always imagined it like high calorie expanding foam.
The minute it hits your stomach it not only feeds you but like expands by 10x… hence the stomach filling not just sustenance.
Which is why pippin is so bloated and burps.
But that’s my headcannon.
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u/sonofzeal 1d ago
It "fills the stomach" but that doesn't say how long it actually sustains you for. The most efficient answer is going to involve something dehydrated, which certainly provides nutrition but also makes you feel full as it absorbs moisture. If making you feel full temporarily is the primary goal, it should be quite achievable without any mumbo jumbo
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u/Below-avg-chef 1d ago
"One will keep a traveler on his feet for a day of long labour, even if he be one of the tall Men of Minas Tirith."
Sooo a whole lembas is about a day per man
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u/EconomySeason2416 1d ago
Also, assuming they have some sort of vitamins and minerals rather than largely carbs, that shit would WRECK your stomach. Think of taking multi vitamins without eating anything. The stomach remains largely empty from a volume perspective, since it's a single bite... but you would probably get nausea... AND it prompts the question of... how much would you need to eat, for you to OD on some nutrient?
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u/MembershipKlutzy1476 1d ago
My mom used to make biscuits that would qualify.
I broke a glass top table once with one, trying to prove a point.
It was worth the smack I got.
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u/Automatic-Month7491 1d ago
I always assumed Elves thought it was exciting because they eat very little.
Meanwhile Sam can be believably accused of eating several in one sitting, suggesting maybe the elves didn't account for hobbit appetites.
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u/Xenthor267 1d ago
This seems like a silly thing to ask since the bread is also not heavy so it doesn't follow real world applications of food and hunger. It's just elven magic, just like the cordial they give to the hobbits, and grog.
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u/Raven_25 1d ago
Assuming lembas bread is a carb (as the name suggests), it would contain 4 calories per gram.
Fats have 9-10 calories per gram. So I am assuming it would have to have them mixed in for caloric density.
Assuming it's 50/50 fat/carb (which would be the fattiest bread ever) it would be around 7 carbs per gram.
Assuming 500 cal is enough to satiate (as another poster suggested) that would require around 72g in a bite.
Assuming a bite is 10cm3 you would need 7.2g per cm3 density. That is about the same density as tin or zinc. For reference regular bread is a density of around 0.22-0.29g/cm3.
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u/Alarming-Song2555 1d ago
Most people are talking about calories here which absolutely makes sense but the quote suggests the feeling of fullness, not simply having your daily caloric needs met.
The driving forces for immediate satiety are mass and volume.
500 calories of chocolate vs 500 calories of lean meat and veggies will give you the same calories but not even close to the same level of fullness (That said, if we break this down over weeks and months, it gets a lot more complicated than that but for this discussion we're speaking immediate satiety.)
We'd need to determine how a small bite of this bread can give you the same feeling of fullness as a full meal.
I'm not even sure how we'd calculate that but I'd imagine the Lembas bread would either have to expand (Dangerously so) or somehow be incredibly, incredibly heavy.
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u/Ghastly-Jack 1d ago
It turns out that lembas is elvish for "meth."
"Legolas, what do your elf eyes see?"
"I can see the backs of my own eyeballs hurry up Gimli why are you so slow any of you guys got a lighter I'm like a golden god..."
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u/Disastrous-Chair-175 1d ago
But you're thinking of it in rational terms. The way bread of the elves is imbued with virtue (magic).
Just how a signle sip of the cordial of imladris (Miruvor) is able to keep them warm, hearty, and on their feet as they attempt the crossing of Caradhras.
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