I
originally planned to do a rather formal, moderately scholarly essay on
John Stuart Mill's "Principle of Liberty" from his monograph On Liberty, and its relevance for publishing calorie counts on restaurant menus
(and such). Then I figured that between the holidays and work coming in
and an ant infestation, I'd just post something short and simple, and
something just written out as a post, not drafted first and then copied
and pasted into a blog post. Which I did, and then woke up in
the middle of the night and decided to add a head note, and for the
first time in years lost an entire piece of writing.
So
to begin again, informally, and putting off the meditation on liberty
and nutrition — and delaying a bit my throwing in way more than my two
cents on the kidnapping and torturing of terrorist detainees (I'm
writing in midish-December of 2014) — and putting off further getting
out holiday cards and present; to begin again: The portion size of a
pizza in America is, for many of us, one pizza.
At
least it was for me when on paper-grading marathons when I taught and
was and remains for me the serving I'm going to eat through within a few
hours while coming up against deadlines for the work I'm doing in
retirement.
So
a couple days ago I ordered in from Pizza Man Dan, a small, thin-crust,
BBQ chicken pizza, with red onions and cilantro, "But hold the
cashews." (That wasn't a special order; in California, that's a menu
item.)
What
is new and different since my last marathon work session is that I now
have the "LoseIt" app and record my food and exercise and discovered
that the two slices of pizza I ate when just getting started was about
half the calories LoseIt calculated I should be eating in a day.
Again,
this was not a hearty Chicago deep-dish pizza nor the sort of
meat-lover's wet dream I used to order before I stopped eating mammals.
This was just two slices of thin-crust that I scarfed up hot out of the
box before I sat down for an actual meal.
By
the end of that initial attack on the pizza, with only half of it down
and on the way to digestion, I was pretty much at my calories for the
day: more exactly the calories if all I was doing was the marathon at
the computer and hadn't hit the elliptical trainer.
Now
pizza is a most-excellent food. As I used to tell my friends, you dip a
well-topped pizza slice in a bit of Metamucil, and you've got all your
food groups: carbohydrates, cheese, tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, animal
protein, and — if you actually did throw in or on some Metamucil, or
ordered a whole wheat crust) — you've got your fiber.
So
it would be handy for poor, thin people to know that pizza is a wise
thing to buy to get good caloric bang for the buck. If you're going to
have only one meal today, a well-stuffed pizza (on sale or in the
dumpster) would be a sensible investment.
If
you're reading on-line blogs, however, you are probably not desperate for
calories and dumpster diving, but you are probably in need of
information about just how food-energy rich — high calorie — are some of
the things (most of the things?) most Americans are cramming into our
bodies.
We
need those calorie counts on menus and with prepared food generally,
and we need them running across the bottom of our TV screens when evil
commercial geniuses are tempting us to eat like we mean it with food porn.
And purveyors of that food, and more so the food porn, should indeed be compelled to supply that information.
How to square that sort of compulsion with the great good of Liberty — that will be the subject of a later blog.
After the rush. After the holidays.
Maybe after I order in another pizza ….
No comments:
Post a Comment