Saturday, April 23, 2011

Brilliant Ideas That Will Never Work: require healthy food to be sold in larger-than-single servings

I previously came up with the idea of requiring unhealthy food to be available in single servings, so people don't find themselves eating more than they'd like because they have leftovers.

What if we also did the opposite and required healthy foods to be sold in larger quantities?

For the purpose of this idea, "healthy" means food where the percentage daily value of bad nutrients (saturated and trans fat, sodium, cholesterol) is significantly lower than the percentage daily value of calories, and the percentage daily value of at least one good nutrient (vitamins, fibre, etc.) is significantly higher than the percentage daily value of calories. ("Significantly" would have a specific numeric value, but I don't have the knowledge to come up with something realistic.) "Serving" means the amount used to calculate the nutritional information in the black and white box on the label.

Perishable healthy foods must be sold in packages of a minimum of two servings, which is still a perfectly reasonable amount for a person to eat in one sitting. Non-perishable healthy foods must be sold in packages of a minimum of six servings, which is either a massive pig-out for one person, or dinner for two, or a meal or two of leftovers.

Produce can continue to be sold as it occurs in nature. (In other words, you can still buy just one apple rather than being forced to buy two.)

The purpose of all this is to get people to fill up on healthier foods, and get healthier leftovers into people's fridges. If your store-bought salad is a double serving, you'll still eat the whole thing, and have less room left for potato chips. If you have leftover high-fibre multigrain pasta with organic sodium-free tomato sauce, you'll probably eat another serving sometime this week instead of ordering pizza.

The reason why this is categorized as Brilliant Ideas That Will Never Work rather than Things They Should Invent is that it has a couple of flaws. First, it's possible that restrictions on how healthy foods can be sold and packaged might make manufacturers and sellers of healthy foods decide it's too much work and just get out of the healthy foods business anyway. We really should be making it as easy as possible to make healthy foods available. Second, in the cases of foods that can have both healthy and unhealthy variations (such as the pasta and tomato sauce example above), the unavailability of smaller sizes (especially if we also require unhealthy food to be sold in single servings) might make people who don't want leftovers make unhealthy choices.

But still, it would be awesome if we could pull it off.

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