"It's the only treat I get"

This is the belief I want to be gentlest with, because I share the premise. The evening snack is one of the few small pleasures in a day full of things that aren't. A book that takes it away is taking something real.

The book doesn't take it away. It keeps the crisps, the sofa and the programme. What it asks you to look at is where in the bag the treat actually is.

Go back to chapter 6. The pleasure of a crisp, measured, is in the first few and falls within two minutes. The first ten crisps are the treat. They're the salt and the crunch and the taste you'd been thinking about since dinner. Crisp number eighty is not a treat. It's a thing your hand did while you watched television, and you couldn't describe its taste if asked, because you didn't taste it. The run doesn't contain more treat than the bowl. It contains the same treat, the first handful, followed by a hundred and forty crisps of nothing and then a feeling at the bottom that isn't a treat at all.

So the belief has the treat in the wrong place. It imagines the pleasure is spread through the bag, so that more bag is more pleasure. It isn't. It's concentrated at the front, and the bowl captures all of it. A bowl of crisps eaten with attention is the whole treat. A bag eaten with a screen is the treat plus a run, and the run is the part you'd give back if you could.

I'd go further, and this is my observation rather than a finding. People who eat crisps from a bowl, looking at them, enjoy crisps more than people who eat them from a bag. They taste them. They know they've had them. They finish the bowl wanting one more, which is the state a treat is supposed to leave you in, rather than finishing the bag wanting never to see a crisp again. If the evening snack is the only treat you get, that's a reason to make it a treat, and the run is the thing that's been stopping it from being one.

Keep the crisps. Have them every night if you like. Put them in a bowl and turn the screen off for two minutes and taste them. That's not a smaller treat. It's the treat you thought you were having.