KFC's "bunless" sandwich

[sbr]

eating healthy is cheap. just shop the specials, eat lower on the food chain, spend a bit of time cooking, and read a bit on nutrition. that's it.

That looks like a LOT of work.

[Ed Anger]

eating healthy is cheap. just shop the specials, eat lower on the food chain, spend a bit of time cooking, and read a bit on nutrition. that's it.

That looks like a LOT of work.

Way too much work. Get out the Hamburger Helper.

[Caliga]

I was mad the first time I opened a box of Hamburger Helper and the little living glove guy wasn't in it.  I wanted to poke his tummy and make him laugh.  RIPOFF! 

[Ed Anger]

I was mad the first time I opened a box of Hamburger Helper and the little living glove guy wasn't in it.  I wanted to poke his tummy and make him laugh.  RIPOFF! 

My miss my old bachelor cooking. 

[DGuller]

eating healthy is cheap. just shop the specials, eat lower on the food chain, spend a bit of time cooking, and read a bit on nutrition. that's it.

Or, I could just not waste my time on that, eat fast food, and use some of the money savings from saving my time to pay for a quadruple bypass.

[saskganesh]

eating healthy is cheap. just shop the specials, eat lower on the food chain, spend a bit of time cooking, and read a bit on nutrition. that's it.

That looks like a LOT of work.

nah. you actually have to work less to earn $ to eat fast food/take out/restaurants all the time.

but it is a cultural shift. do you want to live with things like heart disease, type II diabetes, high cholesterol, diet-related cancers and feeling lazy and overweight as a cultural birthright? and pay more money for that pleasure? sure it's "convenient" but I don't think it's very a good deal.

[saskganesh]

eating healthy is cheap. just shop the specials, eat lower on the food chain, spend a bit of time cooking, and read a bit on nutrition. that's it.

Or, I could just not waste my time on that, eat fast food, and use some of the money savings from saving my time to pay for a quadruple bypass.

exactly.

[Ed Anger]

being lazy is my birthright, you goddamned commie. 

[DGuller]

nah. you actually have to work less to earn $ to eat fast food/take out/restaurants all the time.

but it is a cultural shift. do you want to live with things like heart disease, type II diabetes, high cholesterol, diet-related cancers and feeling lazy and overweight as a cultural birthright? and pay more money for that pleasure? sure it's "convenient" but I don't think it's very a good deal.

Why are you grouping fast food and take out with restaurants?  The first two provide very cheap but crappy food, while restaurants provide crappy food that's extremely over-priced.  It's difficult to make an argument that you spend more money on fast food, it's really dirt cheap compared to alternatives.

[saskganesh]

nah. you actually have to work less to earn $ to eat fast food/take out/restaurants all the time.

but it is a cultural shift. do you want to live with things like heart disease, type II diabetes, high cholesterol, diet-related cancers and feeling lazy and overweight as a cultural birthright? and pay more money for that pleasure? sure it's "convenient" but I don't think it's very a good deal.

Why are you grouping fast food and take out with restaurants?  The first two provide very cheap but crappy food, while restaurants provide crappy food that's extremely over-priced.  It's difficult to make an argument that you spend more money on fast food, it's really dirt cheap compared to alternatives.

just for brevity. obviously there are differences, but judging on what many of you guys prefer to eat, it made sense to lump them together.

[frunk]

Review of the Double Down Sandwich

...I began to feel sick. Merely looking at my beloved potato wedges made me queasy. Who could possibly devour two chicken breast patties, greasy bacon, and two slices of cheese, and still have room left over for fried potato wedges and a soda? For that matter, who would want to simultaneously eat two cheese-and-bacon-addled chicken-breast patties? What began as a pleasant surprise quickly devolved into a nightmare. I struggled to keep the sandwich down. I felt defeated, lost, overwhelmed. I like cheese, I like bacon, and I like chicken breasts, but the combination was too much of a greasy thing. I left that KFC a shattered man. I had finished the Double Down. Or had the Double Down finished me?

So consider me your fast-food Paul Revere, sending out a warning throughout the land: The Double Down is coming! The Double Down is coming! Be afraid, dear reader. Be very, very afraid.

[Sheilbh]

To my mind, adding some sort of calculation of the relative "morality" of various lifestyle choices to the mix of what ought to be publicly safety-netted  is a legal, ethical and accounting morass which we would be well advised to avoid. Particularly as the desions are bound to be made on political grounds and not on any hard-headed objective basis.

I disagree.  I think there are certain things government should do because they are better for society.  For example I think it's right that benefits should encourage people into work, I think we should encourage marriage because that has social benefits, I think we should discourage smoking and drinking because they have negative social and health effects for which government ultimately pays.  We tax cigarettes a huge amount, at the same time we don't tax childrens' books at all - but we do tax video games and kids' DVDs.  All of these actions make judgements about morality and try to change individual behaviour.  So I don't think food necessarily should be separate from those attempts.

My only worry is that what all this ultimately leads to is a victimisation of the poor.

[Brazen]

I disagree.  I think there are certain things government should do because they are better for society.  For example I think it's right that benefits should encourage people into work, I think we should encourage marriage because that has social benefits, I think we should discourage smoking and drinking because they have negative social and health effects for which government ultimately pays.  We tax cigarettes a huge amount, at the same time we don't tax childrens' books at all - but we do tax video games and kids' DVDs.  All of these actions make judgements about morality and try to change individual behaviour.  So I don't think food necessarily should be separate from those attempts.

My only worry is that what all this ultimately leads to is a victimisation of the poor.

There was an interesting programme on Radio 4 (of course) exploring how the government can persuade people to do things that are good for their health, environment and so on, employing the much-hyped "Nudge" principle. The idea is that statistics saying, for instance, "30% of the population is now clinically obese" or having a sign in the doctor's waiting room saying "127 hours of appointments were missed last month"  normalise the behaviour they are trying to change. "If everyone else is like me, why should I change?"

They should instead give facts related to the healthy or target  norm, such as "50% of the UK population is a normal weight which they maintain through a mostly healthy diet and light exercise."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mk7rq

[Sheilbh]

There was an interesting programme on Radio 4 (of course) exploring how the government can persuade people to do things that are good for their health, environment and so on, employing the much-hyped "Nudge" principle. The idea is that statistics saying, for instance, "30% of the population is now clinically obese" or having a sign in the doctor's waiting room saying "127 hours of appointments were missed last month"  normalise the behaviour they are trying to change. "If everyone else is like me, why should I change?"

They should instead give facts related to the healthy or target  norm, such as "50% of the UK population is a normal weight which they maintain through a mostly healthy diet and light exercise."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mk7rq

I'll watch that.  I've read about the 'nudge' theory.  It's incredible some of the stuff to do with that.  One of the ones that interested me was like your example but to do with littering.  The wording of the sign apparently had a pretty large impact on the amount of litter that was dropped in the park.

I really need to read the book at some point.

[Brazen]

More here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8255153.stm

Can politicians shape our behaviour?

By Martin Rosenbaum
Producer, BBC Radio 4's Persuading Us to be Good

Are you a good citizen?

The kind who doesn't drink too much but always puts the empties in the recycling box? The kind who ignores tempting store credit card offers but does give blood, who saves prudently for your pension while avoiding unprotected sex?

In short, the kind who does what the nanny state might want you to do?

And if you're not yet perfect, how can the state persuade you to become better?

That's the question a growing number of politicians, local government officials, health professionals and think-tank members are grappling with, as they puzzle over how best to change public behaviour to achieve their policy goals.

Personal choices

And they are now turning to the increasingly influential ideas of social psychology and behavioural economics in their search for answers.

"In many areas now there are limits to the cures that can be achieved by government alone," says the climate change minister, Joan Ruddock.

"Behaviour change is a very important priority because we know that things like health and the environment are affected by the choices people make."

And the Conservatives are also interested, according to the shadow chancellor George Osborne.

He argues: "Social psychologists are helping governments around the world design policy solutions that are more effective than big state solutions. If you go with the grain of people's instincts you are more likely to achieve the public policy outcomes you want, rather than sitting in a government department dreaming up some rational scheme that doesn't work in practice."

Barnet Council in north west London is one of those local authorities trying to improve its population.

In one pilot scheme in Finchley, the residents have been asked to reduce their carbon footprint by turning down their heating, reducing their car use, and so on.

A traditional persuasive strategy would be based on stressing how this could benefit the environment. But the council is going further in testing out techniques of influence.

The residents are asked to make pledges in a face-to-face conversation with one of the canvassers who have been going door-to-door in this area.

They are only asked to make some limited pledges - to choose three out of nine options on the pledge card they are shown.

And posters on lampposts proclaim the number of households in that street who have agreed to participate.

Peer pressure

In other words, this project is based on enticing people into making a small but face-to-face commitment and then using the force of peer pressure to encourage others.

"If you go to someone's door and say 'can you do a great deal for the environment?', they're probably going to back off," says Daniel Delange, of the charity Groundwork, which the council has employed to implement the project.

"But if you say 'a little bit for the environment', they feel they can do a little bit and feel good about themselves for doing it."

"We put these posters up, so we hope the neighbours see," he adds. "We hope the neighbours will feel 'if they're all doing it, maybe I should be doing it as well'."

But there is still some way to go.

When we asked one resident if she was impressed by the posters about the number of neighbours taking part, she replied: "Not knowing who the neighbours were, I don't know."

For the council leader, Mike Freer, this approach is an idea whose time has come.

He says: "The role of the council has shifted away from being a provider of services to being responsible for helping local citizens improve their lives. Nudging people along is a terrific idea, we've got to stop nagging. If nagging worked we'd all be skinny, we'd all be recycling and we'd all be walking to work."

The Barnet pilot scheme is being funded by the Department of Communities and Local Government, which wants to examine how well the academic theories involved can be implemented in practice.

Similar ideas are also being employed at the national level.

If you fill out the "carbon calculator" on the government's Action CO2 campaign site, you will see that at the end it compares your carbon consumption to that of other households like yours.

Some of this is based on the work of the leading American social psychologist, Professor Robert Cialdini.

He argues that the key role of peer pressure or "social proof" is illustrated by a Californian experiment about trying to reduce household energy consumption.

The participants were given information about how cutting consumption could benefit the environment, and also about what other households were doing to save energy.

The outcome?

"The messages we sent to them about what their neighbours were doing were the only ones that made a difference," he says.

New jargon

But this also suggests that politicians who complain about how widespread an undesirable behaviour is can inadvertently be encouraging it, because it can help that behaviour become a social norm.

This applies to everything from young people carrying knives to patients who don't turn up for their medical appointments.

Thus Professor Cialdini believes that talk of an "obesity epidemic" simply encourages more obesity.

"Instead of normalising the undesirable behaviour, you want to marginalise it," he adds.

All this may mean that we have to learn a new item of political terminology.

"I'm starting to hear local authorities that were quite recently using the phrase 'place-shaping' as the jargon for what they did now talk about 'person-shaping'," says Matthew Taylor, a former Downing Street policy aide to Tony Blair.

The term "person-shaping" probably won't appeal to politicians, but it could increasingly describe what they are trying to do.