No One Eats Like Gaston
Continuing what I suppose is by now a series analyzing Disney musicals, we turn to the question of Gaston. He eats, we are told, five dozen eggs every morning, which he claims makes him roughly the size of a barge. Now, it’s pretty well-established that we shouldn’t trust everything Gaston says. But is he right about this?
In the early 1800s, at least in the USA, most chickens laid eggs that weighed about eight or nine to a pound. France in the 1700s presumably had similar chickens, since the chickens the US sources are talking about would have been brought to the Americas by Europeans. Given that some of that is shell, we’ll use the higher figure and go for nine eggs to the pound, telling us that Gaston eats 6 2/3 pounds of eggs every morning, or, assuming three meals a day of approximately the same size, a nice round 20 pounds of eggs a day.
Eggs have different caloric values depending on how you cook them. We do see Gaston swallow them whole, raw, so presumably he isn’t too fussy, but we also see that he’s alive and well and not infected by various diseases, so we can assume he does normally cook them. It seems in-character for him to just take whatever kind of eggs are given to him day by day, so we’ll use WolframAlpha’s average value for cooked eggs, which gives us a total of 14370 calories per day.
For context, as of the 2017 live-action movie, Gaston looks identical to actor Luke Evans, who is almost exactly six feet tall and weighs 189 pounds, and was 38 at the time. According to the USDA, a very active man in that condition should be eating 3564 calories per day. Gaston is eating enough for almost exactly four people.
At this point, it’s pretty clear that Gaston is not, in fact, a person, but some other kind of animal. (Some kind of beast, one might even suggest.) According to Kleiber’s Law, a trend which applies across a remarkably large number of species, body mass scales with the 4/3 power of metabolic rate, so we would expect Gaston to have a mass of 4^(4/3) that of an average human. Continuing to use Luke Evans as our baseline human, we would expect Gaston to weigh about 1100 pounds, or almost exactly half a (metric) ton.
So how big is a barge? It’s almost certain that Gaston is referring to the canal barges that were crucial to the French economy at the time. In the late 1700s, a 60-ton barge was not an uncommon sight. I’m pretty sure that that number refers to the barge’s weight fully loaded, so let’s guess wildly, based on some tangentially-related figures, that the fraction of that fully-loaded weight that’s the barge structure itself is about 1/2, or 30 tons. That’s 60 times heavier than Gaston.
Comparing volume, rather than mass, makes the picture even worse. Oak wood has a density 0.65 times that of water, and Gaston is mostly eggs, which are mostly water, so in terms of volume he’s 60/0.65=92 times smaller. He’s off by almost two orders of magnitude.
In short, Gaston believes that he’s 92 times more impressive than he is. I don’t have much to say about this, but I will observe in closing that it seems about right.