What the run costs you

I've argued the mechanism. This chapter is the bill, and it's smaller than a diet book would make it and larger than "it's just a snack".

The label. Turn the sharing bag over. It has a number on it, and the number is per bag, or per hundred grams with the bag being a hundred and fifty, and I'm not going to quote one because bags differ. But look at yours. Three sharing bags a week is three of that number, eaten by a person who wanted a handful, and over a year that's a figure you'd have said was impossible if it were a meal. It isn't a meal. It's the part of the evening you don't remember.

The sugar, for the sweets. The NHS's guidance is no more than thirty grams of free sugars a day for an adult, and its food labelling guide says that more than twenty-two and a half grams of total sugar per hundred grams is high. A bag of sweets is mostly sugar. A bag of sweets in the car is most of a day's sugar in a traffic jam, and it's eaten by chapter 12's person who won't remember it.

The feeling at the bottom. Slightly sick, slightly cross with yourself, a verdict forming. Three times a week. That's a hundred and fifty evenings a year that end on that note, for a snack you meant to enjoy.

The money. A sharing bag costs more than a small bag and less than five small bags, which is the economy the shelf offers, and the economy is real if you eat a fifth of it a night and false if you eat all of it. The run turns a bargain into five small bags in one sitting.

The meals displaced. Robinson's distracted eaters ate more at the next meal, not less. The run doesn't replace tomorrow's lunch. It adds to it, because it wasn't remembered, and the body eats as though it hadn't happened.

The children watching. A child on the same sofa learns that a bag is a unit and a screen is where you eat it, and takes both to their own sofa in twenty years. The bowl teaches something different, and they'll learn that too, and it's the only nutrition lesson that needs no words.

The wanting itself, oddly. A person who reaches the bottom three times a week wants crisps more, not less, because the wanting is being fed by the run rather than by the crisps. The run trains the hand and the hour, and by the next evening the hand and the hour are asking for it, and the crisps are almost incidental.

None of this is a catastrophe. It's the cost of a habit, spread thin across evenings, and most of it disappears with a cereal bowl.