How Many Pancakes Would It Take to Feed Paul Bunyan?

America has a tremendous roster of folk heroes. Want to teach kids to work hard? Boom, John Henry. Want to teach them to treat nature with respect and plan for the future? Easy, Johnny Appleseed. Want to teach them to ride a mountain lion? Pecos Bill.

None among them stand larger than Paul Bunyan.

Literally.

The dude was massive.

Beyond his gargantuan stature, Bunyan was famous for many things: creating many of America’s natural landmarks, clearing millions of acres of forests (which was cool at the time), and eating a colossal quantity of pancakes.

We’re going to focus on this last one, because I find it difficult to relate to creating ten thousand lakes with my footsteps, but breakfast carbs are right up my alley.

Paul’s a big boy and he eats a lot of pancakes, so the question is, how many?

How Big Was Paul Bunyan?

Per Disney’s 1958 animated short, Paul Bunyan is “63 axe handles high.” The standard length of a felling axe is 36 inches, which would put Paul’s height at 189′.

Paul Bunyan is 22′ taller than Niagara Falls.

Calculating his weight will require another step. Bunyan is famously built like a freight train, so I think the most accurate scaled-down modern day counterpart is Hafþór Björnsson, former World’s Strongest Man, deadlift world record holder, and Game of Thrones‘ The Mountain.

Hafþór measures in at a monstrous 6’9″, 452 pounds. This means that Paul is 28 times taller. But weight does not scale linearly with height. Weight scales with the cube of height, meaning Bunyan is not 28 but 28³ times heavier: 9,922,304 lbs.

Paul Bunyan is 50% heavier than a Saturn V rocket.

How Many Calories Would Paul Have to Eat?

We turn once again to Hafþór Björnsson, whose diet is meticulously tracked. In one day, Hafþór routinely puts away 10,668 Calories.

Per our calculations, Bunyan is 21,952 times heavier than Björnsson, which means every day, Paul would have to consume 234,183,936 Calories.

I couldn’t decide on the best way to illustrate this, so to really hammer it home, this amount of Calories:

• Would last an ordinary person over 320 years
• Is more than the recommended daily intake for the city of Green Bay, WI
• Exceeds the yield of 58 acres of wheat fields
• Contains more energy than 250 tons of TNT

What’s That in Pancakes?

First of all, we’re not gonna make Paul eat his pancakes plain. He’s getting butter and syrup, end of discussion.

Let’s take a look at the nutritional info for a single pancake with butter and syrup.

To hit our 234,183,936 Calorie goal, we’d simply need to make this meal 890,433 times larger.

So we could get him 890,433 pancakes with butter and syrup (answering the original question), but I think it’s more fun to think of it as one big one.

In other words, this would be over four football fields of pancake, two F-150s of butter, and a concrete mixer truck full of syrup.

Every day.

Bon Appetit Paul!