Nearing The End - Food For Thought

As this last month of stuffing myself comes to an end, I've bumped into another plateau. No matter how much I've eaten recently, my weight hovers between 260 and 264 lbs. My hope of pushing myself into scale-overflow territory has dwindled.

This means that, starting July 2nd, I will have about 65 pounds to lose. (July 1 being Canada Day, I've decided to extend the stuffit fest one more day, liveblogged.)

A few times, I've bumped into my eyes being greater than my stomach. This is a common human trait, but the consequences are quite profound. As long as we have this tendency to get more food than we ourselves can eat, we're inclined to share what we can't stuff down our own throat.

I really suspect that this fact is behind our tendency to share with others. As long as we're inclined to hunt or gather more food than we can eat, we'll also be inclined to share some of it with others because such sharing doesn't cost us a thing at the margin. If it's a choice between passing food someone else's way versus self-inducing a stomachache by eating it all (or the third option of wasting it), which is the more rational choice?

In a way, this realization is profound, as it explains a lot of the gut-level hostility to savings and capital accumulation that recurs throughout our history. The common-sensical, if primitive, view of money as "stored food" would excite a lot of rancour if the person with more money than spending doesn't give away the surplus.

All because we tend to have eyes bigger than our stomachs. We might even be genetically programmed to be this way.


h/t: This thought didn't just come from eating. It was sparked by my re-reading of a neglected classic, The Myth Of the Welfare State by Jack D. Douglas - specifically, the chapter entitled "The Ancient Dawn of Welfare Statism."

[By mistake, I had earlier put Chapter 2; it's actually Chapter 3. There also exists overestimation of memory skills.]