And I don’t mean those cute little kitchen scales you can get at the dollar store.

It occurred to me as I was improvising a supper for myself tonight that there is a scale one can used to measure how much time and energy you are willing to invest in cooking at a particular point in time.

On one end, you have the true gourmet experience, where you carefully choose the ingredients, prepare them carefully, cook the meal slowly, and only then do you taste the fruits of all your loving labors.

On the other end, the one where most of us live, is the phenomenon I call SPTF, or Shortest Path To Food.

This path encompasses both time and effort. You want food and you don’t give a damn about how you get it or, sometimes, even what the hell it is. You just want to get to eating ASAP.

This is the sort of thing that leads to people eating pickle and mayonnaise sandwiches over a sink while drinking generic cola and finishing it all off with half a stale donut you forgot you had.

It it also what causes me to end up eating a sandwich, a soup bowl full of junk food, and a piece of fruit for most meals. And that is very sad.

Note that this scale measures perceived time and effort, not real time and effort. One might well be able to make a compelling logical argument that something tastier and more nutritious would involve exactly the same amount of time and effort, but that argument fails the SPTF effort test because included in the cost of this brilliant new thing is the time and mental energy it takes to learn it, and that can’t begin to compare with how easy it is to do something you have done a million times before.

I think a lot of the people pushing healthier alternatives miss that vital point. Generally, people consider their food options on a kind of auto-pilot and while our auto-pilot circuit is vital to our ability to get through the day, it is also very stupid and makes decisions based on emotion and need, not reason.

That is why I think that the only truly effective weapon in the battle for better public nutrition is tasty healthy snack foods. That way you can reach the very bottom of the scale, the person who does not want to cook at all and just wants to open a bag of something and eat it.

If you can reach that level of simple animal need, you can then reach higher up the tree, so to speak. Remember, the nutritionally deprived often don’t have the nutrition to even make solid decisions. People get off work and their brain does a much needed shutdown so they can recover from the days stresses and process everything that happened.

Sure, they would actually feel a whole lot better and be better at coping with everything if they ate better, but you have to get them on the path first.

That reminds me of my idea for the “Eat Everything” diet. The secret of the diet is simple. Subtract nothing from people’s diets. Telling them they can’t have what they want just makes them feel guilty for wanting them, and that only leads to abandoning the diet, because they get tired of feeling guilty and it is easier to modify one’s participation in a diet than it is to modify one’s basic needs and desires.

Instead of subtracting, add. Add nutritious foods to your diet. You can still have all of the other stuff that you want. All you are doing is adding some good things too.

It is literally an “eat more and weigh less” diet.

See, a lot of the problems with obesity actually come from nutritional deficits. Obese people are far more likely to have extremely unhealthy diets and this causes them to misidentify nutritional cravings as just hunger in general.

It’s shocking to think about, but maybe the reason someone eats and eats and is never truly satisfied is that they are eating the wrong things. Their body wants something in particular. They just don’t know how to really hear what it is telling them.

And what is keeping them from hearing? The natural biases of the human palate. Thanks to how we are wired, we will always get the maximum reward from things that are sweet, creamy, and salty.

And of course, when given the choice, all animals go for the highest reward food available.

Thus, over time, a lot of us gravitate towards unhealthy foods because they are the sweetest, creamiest, saltiest things around. Natural healthy foods can’t compete.

And so we, of course, end up eating a lot of the food that activates the hell out of the reward center of the brain. It’s the most popular form of self-medication in the world. Modern society takes a hell of a lot out of us, and we try to compensate with food.

For obese people, this tendency is exaggerated until it becomes their dominant coping mechanism. It is useless to tell them to eat properly when doing so would vastly decrease their reward level. The reward center of our brain is the only reason we do anything. Decrease reward, and depression sets in./

So to try to bring this back to what I was trying to talk about, the “Eat Everything” diet hacks that system by maintaining reward levels. True, there is still the hurdle of overcoming the aversion to eating anything that is not maximally rewarding, but that’s a much lower hurdle than trying to convince people they will be okay when they give up their dominant coping mechanism.

They would need to switch to another, equally powerful source of reward right away to have any chance of success, and only you have a team of highly skilled prostitutes on call, it’s not going to happen.

That’s why the future belongs to very tasty healthy snack foods. High reward AND high nutrition.

People are working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.