What?
The Full Stop Bowl is a lipless receptacle with a central concavity modelled on the proportions of a human stomach.
Why?
Your gut instincts are wrong.
Well?
It sounds like an aggressive cricketing technique. It looks like a Damien Hirst artwork: “The physical impossibility of dignity in the mind of someone eating from a stomach-shaped plate, 2017”. Who would own tableware like this? The Full Stop Bowl is a false gut designed to hold the same volume of food as its visceral equivalent, the one inside your hideous skin. Which, it turns out, is not much; far less than feels satisfying, though admittedly I like to pile it in. (As I see it, the main downside of Brexit will be lack of access to the fabled EU food mountains I heard about as a child. I was going to do a road trip directly through those one day. Top down, mouth open. Heroic stuff.)
I’m a glutton, but science says it’s not my fault: it takes 20 minutes for the feeling of satiety to travel from body to brain, which you would have to say is a bad move by the enteric nervous system. As a result, we are all eating more than we need, because we don’t know we are full. The bowl aims to correct this.
I have a go, eating three puny helpings from it a day. “If that leaves you a little hungry between meals,” the press release advises, “then enjoy the unusual sensation.” NOPE. It’s good for pasta, less so for rigid foods. A slice of pizza sat awkwardly over the entire hole. Soup slopped into the open canal at the edge of the bowl representing the pyloric sphincter. (Bon appétit!)
I spent the day chasing satisfaction and more food, a cross between Mick Jagger and Oliver Twist. Yet when I magically crammed an entire cinnamon tear and share into the bowl by crumbing it, like David Copperfield, I couldn’t eat it.
The Full Stop Bowl succeeds as an appetite suppressant because, like my diet, it’s gross. No one should endure this body horror. The makers will expand the range into oesophageal drinking straws or espresso cups shaped like an anus next. I can’t stomach it. By the end of the day, I’ve had enough.
Redeeming features?
Socio-nutritionally speaking, portion distortion ain’t no joke. Although it does sound quite funny.
Counter, drawer, back of the cupboard?
Workhouse. (“Please, sir, I want some more. More than that. More than that.”) 2/5
