Against Bulk
I snack. In this habit, I wander closest to any of the seven deadly sins, Gluttony.
As far as sins go, as far as things to feel bad about, I grant it’s not too bad. Though, maybe that’s because snacking seems so innocent. My snacking does jeopardize certain projects I care about in my life, and does contradict my professed values. If left to my own devices, there are days I can eat an entire large bag of chips, have half a loaf of bread, scoop peanut butter directly into my mouth. Food refuses to stay in my house. Food that I can snack on—by which I mean literally any piece of food that doesn’t require cooking, leaving even relatively healthy options like unsalted peanuts or whole-wheat bread suspect—compels me to snack. And this thwarts three projects in my life that I cherish: my health, my frugality, and my commitment to the environment.
Reduction underpins all three of the above. We put “reduce” at the front of the adage “reduce, reuse, recycle” because our over-consumption cannot be readily undone. Its environmental impacts in cross-continental truck transport, its human toll in Amazon fulfillment centers, does not reverse itself upon recycling. How much trash, carbon, have I made by eating an entire jar of peanut butter in a day rather than a week? Cookie sleeves, Bugle bags, enough plastic and paper to plaster the hides of a few dozen turtles or more. My health depends on lowering my salt intake and losing weight—I’m a pre-hypertensive—and so while eating some amount of bread isn’t a problem, devouring eight slices over the course of the day is too many calories and too much sodium. And on the pecuniary front, these snacks take a bite out of my wallet.
A popular contrarian take is that buying things in bulk is not always best.
But this analysis remains fiscal at its core. Smart Asset says there are hidden costs in shopping at Costco, namely reduced selection, which will make you waste time with trips to multiple stores. A few blogs, like Eat This Not That, have specific items that you shouldn’t buy in bulk due to possibility of spoiling, or due to bulk purchases having lower quality.
But these focus on prices, costs, hidden monetary value, purely rational concerns.
None of these speak to the reason that I can’t buy in bulk. My issue is not rational. If I buy in bulk, I will eat in bulk. It requires recognizing that I am not a rational actor in complete control of my being.
The only defense I have found against my snacking is to simply not keep on hand anything I can snack on. This fact has surfaced in my consumption diaries, which often include a few trips to the store to purchase a little snack and some seltzer. It may at first seem silly that I don’t just buy a case of La Croix and a box of Kind Bars, saving money and saving myself a trip to the store. But if I bought a box of six Kind Bars, I would eat three Kind Bars in a day. I’d actually be losing money. The trip to the store is not inefficiency, but a defense against myself.
Everything I eat has to have some sort of cost of activation. For sweets, like the Kind Bars, that activation cost is walking to the store. As for the things I keep inside my house, everything needs to be cooked in some way before consumption. I have lentils, oats, powdered peanut butter rather than normal peanut butter, pasta. I even had to replace baby carrots with adult carrots so that the act of peeling the skin might preclude grazing. The only way I can prevent an irrational overindulgence is by creating a world for myself where I cannot overindulge.
You may think that I’m being too hard on myself. But situations in which one has conflicting desires, professed values and pleasures which run contrary to them, have that effect on people. I know people who smoke and want to quit. Whenever they take out a cigarette they feel this tension. Snacking is my smoking. I know that my salt and caloric intake damages my health. I have gone to urgent care before because my blood pressure was 160/120 and I felt I was going to faint. This is not the mere fatphobia or hatred of food that warps so many Americans. It is not a desire for a beach body.
It’s my life threatened. It’s conflict over conflicting values and conflicting desires. What the heart wants, and what the heart needs to keep pumping.
There is some economics I learned in the behavioral mode which shows why my severe limitation of what I keep in my house is the rational defense against my irrational eating habits. It’s a mathematical model of smoking.
The model is game theoretic, and our players are two versions of yourself. We will call your present incarnation “the planner” and your future version “the doer.” This arrangement may at first baffle, but bifurcating the self into two players with distinct problems, agendas and goals is a common strategy in microeconomics. It lets us mathematize better our conflicting desires: don’t you ever feel like your greatest enemy is yourself, that at once you are Kasparov and Deep Blue?
It’s a two-step game where the planner goes first, making some decision on how to spend the evening, and then the doer must live with this decision and will do what they please. In this case, the planner gets to decide between staying inside and going to a party. Yet, these players have different ideas of what matters: the planner wants to cut back on their smoking, but the doer just wants to have fun. If the doer finds themselves at a party, they will smoke, because drinking goes with smoking and the doer does what makes them happy.
This presents a dilemma for the planner—they also want to have a good time, but this Mr. Hyde whose turn comes next makes partying a riskier option. If the doer were like the planner and did not have such buzzing desires, everything would work out. If the planner could attend the party, all would be well.
In two-turn games like this, we try to solve for what the first player should do, since they shall bequeath the state of the game to the second player. Depending on that state, we can easily predict what the second player will do: in this case, they smoke if they go to a party, and they don’t smoke if they don’t. So, the first player gets the option of selecting the world in which the second player plays. In this case the rational solution would be for the first player to avoid the party, because we know that the doer will decide to smoke even if the planner wouldn’t.
Accidental windfalls of food are another problem for me. My roommate was gifted candied pecans last week. She has made them communal. Since she can control herself around food, and I can’t, I will eat the bulk of them. I likely need to accept this fact, that I’ll be eating more pecans than I would have liked. Sometimes the party comes to the smoker. Real life has more than two players.
Economic models inscribe parables in equations. I keep coming back to this idea that the person who buys things thinks differently from the person who actually consumes them, which shows up in my sale-fueled Steam purchases and my purchasing of too expensive computers. I likely stole from the parable above, this idea of a buying Jekyll and consuming Hyde, when writing these previous pieces.
Snacking is the same for me, and likely for others. The right move is to plan a life without snacks, to be smart while shopping, or there will be snacking. We sometimes need to see our future self as something to defend against, because their values may nominally coincide with ours, but their actions may reveal new desires, new sins. Spirit, flesh, as Christians say.
I value frugality, health, and environmentalism. I also value snacks. To live with two sets of contradicting values requires planning. For me, it requires planning to not buy in bulk.