This article in the New York Times today is very interesting to me. I'd like to read this researcher's book. I think that eating is a very interesting subject, and I find our culture's obsession with it also interesting. We've become so wealthy that most never worry about where their next meal is coming from, however we eat as if we may starve tomorrow.
Just this morning brining Moishe home from the doctor, we were both hungry and he began to cry. The route from the doctor involves a major highway, and morning rush hour traffic, with no place to stop and eat between, and then twenty minutes on a major arterial, with few places to stop. We were in stop and go traffic on that road when we stopped just in front of the entrance for the McDonald's drive through. With my son wailing in the back seat, and Sergio Mendes and Will.I.Am bouncing the car along, I almost went in and picked up a few breakfast sandwiches for us to eat as we drove home. But then I didn't.
I kicked myself five minutes later as we stood completely still in the increasing density of shiny metal boxes with the baby roaring in my ear. Then, another ten minutes down the road is a Starbucks that also sells breakfast sandwiches, ones that shabbir likes quite a bit. I don't; I eat them when we eat there, and they're convenient, but they're neither tasty nor healthy in my opinion. We could have gone to Starbucks, spent five minutes on line, waited ten minutes for the sandwiches and coffee, spent ten minutes parking and unparking, or we could have gone home to make breakfast in probably the same quantity of time. So I didn't go.
Instead I made a very hungry baby and myself poached eggs, oatmeal and edamame. I think that my menu - which excluded cheese, bacon, and sausage - was by far healthier than either of my choices and cheaper too. In the first case probably by about $5, and in the second, probably by $10.
In the end, I did what was best, but it involved some serious contemplation of risk and rewards. As the author of the book says, we're often manipulated by the way food is presented - the ease of getting it and the quantity influence our capacity to eat, i.e. the ease of access and the larger portion presented, the more we eat. Unless you're 1, in which case what you don't eat you very happily fling to the floor.
