What it does to the snack

There's a cost that lands on the crisps, and it's the one that convinces most people, in my experience, because it's about pleasure and not about health.

You've stopped tasting crisps. Not entirely, and not the first one, but the crisp as a thing you enjoy has been buried under the run. Ask yourself when you last ate a crisp and thought about how good it was. For most people who eat from the bag with a screen on, the honest answer is the first one of each bag, and possibly not even that, because the first one is eaten while reaching for the remote.

Rolls's finding in chapter 6 was that the pleasantness of a food falls as you eat it, fast. That's a fact about tongues and it applies to everyone. What the run does is take a food whose pleasure is in the first handful and eat it in units of a hundred and fifty grams, so that the proportion of each bag that's actually enjoyed is small and shrinking. You're eating more crisps than you've ever eaten and enjoying them less than you did as a child with a small bag at a party, and the reason isn't age. It's the unit.

The screen does the rest. A crisp eaten while watching television isn't tasted, because attention is on the television, and a crisp that isn't tasted isn't a crisp. It's a texture in the mouth while the eyes are elsewhere. The programme gets most of you and the crisps get the hand.

So the run has done a strange thing to the snack. It's made you eat it more and want it less, or want it in the way one wants a habit rather than a pleasure. The wanting at half past eight isn't for crisps. It's for the run, which is a thing you do with your hand while you unwind, and the crisps happen to be in it.

The bowl gives the snack back. A handful, tasted, with the screen off, is a handful you'll remember, and the taste is the taste you'd forgotten crisps had. People who try this for a week say the same thing, which is that they'd forgotten how good the first one is. They hadn't forgotten. They'd just stopped having it, because the first one was the opening move of a run and not a thing in itself.

That's what the run costs the snack. It takes the treat and hides it in a bag of texture, and the bowl is how you find it again.