"A bowl is fussy"

Some readers will resist the bowl on grounds of temperament. Pouring crisps into a bowl is what your grandmother did. It's fussy. It's the sort of thing people do who iron their tea towels. You're a person who eats from the bag like a normal adult.

I'd ask who the bowl is fussy for. Nobody's watching you on the sofa. The bowl takes about fifteen seconds and a trip to the cupboard you were making anyway. The fussiness isn't in the effort or in anyone's opinion. It's in the picture of yourself as someone who doesn't need a bowl, and that picture has been reaching the bottom of the bag three times a week.

The bowl is a partition, in Cheema and Soman's sense from chapter 8, and it's the cheapest one there is. It puts a decision between you and the second handful, which the bag doesn't. It gives you the visual information about how much you've had, which the bag doesn't. It makes the unit a handful, which the bag doesn't. Fifteen seconds buys all three, and the return is that you eat the crisps you wanted and stop, without any willpower at all, because the bowl did the stopping.

There's a version of the objection that's about the sofa specifically. The point of a snack on the sofa is that it's easy, and a bowl makes it a thing. I'd say the bowl makes it a snack, and the bag makes it a run, and one of those is easy in the way you meant and the other is easy in the way a hill is easy going down. A cereal bowl on the arm of the sofa is not an event. It's crisps, in a bowl, on the sofa, and it's what a snack looked like before sharing bags were invented.

If you want a test, do it for a week. Bowl every time, bag back in the cupboard with the clip on. Then look at your list from chapter 1 and count how often you reached the bottom. In my experience the answer is never, and a habit that stops on a week of cereal bowls wasn't a willpower problem.