The informational quality of food

The deal is that I can't finish the King's song until I take some time to work out the next bit of underscoring, what are each of the pianists saying in response to what the King is saying, how does that affect what I hope to convey to the audience and how do I maintain their attention, and the other deal is that I can't think about any of that until I get to the end of my current thought, which is to tell you the rest of what Larry and I talked about the other day.

I will put a button on the whole "kids should have true purchasing power" thing by telling a story of the Christmas I mistakenly believed I had been given purchasing power, I think I may have been five years old, we were visiting my grandmother and my aunt in Fresno, and I had received a $50 savings bond.

What I wanted to do with that money – not realizing, of course, that it wasn't actually money – was buy my entire family McDonald's French fries.

(To be fair, McDonald's was still frying their fries in beef tallow back in those days.)

I remember telling my mother that we could, that I could pay for it, and having her explain to me that I couldn't, that I hadn't actually been given $50, and then of course I told her that she could buy them and I would pay her back when the savings bond matured and she said no.

I guess the question is whether I would have remembered that day quite as well if I had been given $50 and had been allowed to buy six packets of McDonald's French fries for all of us to eat together. Would I have learned anything worth learning from that experience?

Or would the fries, as my mother told me when I asked her why she couldn't buy them, have been too expensive?

A packet of McDonald's fries, back in 1985 or whenever it was, would have cost about 60 cents. There is no way that could have been considered expensive, not even in 1985, unless you factored the cost – as my mother did – against the informational value of the food.

The quality, in other words.

"Everything has quality," I was explaining to Larry last night, "including things like food. The meal we are eating right now has a tremendous amount of information in it, and the meal we ate at the restaurant the other night didn't."

The meal we were eating at the time included:

• Ribeye steak, cooked rare
• Freshly-baked bread
• Potatoes roasted in butter, lemon and dill
• Salad made with greens and tomatoes grown in-house (literally, we have a basement garden)
• Borganzola cheese
• Dark chocolate
• Red wine

The meal we had eaten at the restaurant included:

• Nachos topped with things that you wouldn't expect to find on nachos

"Most restaurant food right now has a novelty factor," Larry said, "but there's only so much you can extract out of that. You don't want to eat that meal again, and maybe that's why there's always something new on the menu."

"But you do want to eat this meal again," I said, referring to what we were eating at the moment.

"I want to eat nearly every meal we make in this house again," Larry said.

"Because it's full of information," I insisted.

Obviously you'll want to substitute the word nutrition for information, but I think that's simplifying it somewhat. If it were just nutrition, then we could all drink Huel or Soylent or any of those and be fine, and I tried drinking Huel for an extended period of time and I felt like a highly functional robot. Fully nourished, with enough energy to do exactly the same things I did yesterday!

(This, by the way, is the underlying purpose of those kinds of beverages.)

And I do believe that you can tell the informational value of food on first taste, and this in-and-of-itself provides information as to whether you may want to keep eating it.

(This, by the way, was what Ray Peat was trying to tell us.)

Last night I also told Larry that the quality=information theory also applied to clothing.

"Right now we are both wearing clothing we purchased in the early 2000s, right?"

We were.

"So why are we still wearing it? Because it's still giving us new information."

Some of the information is about external organization ("yes, this sweater still keeps me warm"). Some is about internal organization ("yes, this sweater still makes me look like the person I believe myself to be, even though I am no longer the person I was when I last wore it").

And the thing is that each of our respective outfits was what you might consider classic, in the sense that Larry was wearing a gray sweater with a shawl collar, and I was wearing a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Also jeans. Say what you like about jeans, but nobody has yet invented anything better – to the point at which jeans are now acceptable at pretty much every function that isn't explicitly labeled "black tie," and of course you wouldn't wear your worn-out jeans to a wedding (worn-out jeans are like worn-out ideas, you put them on either when you don't have any other options or when you're doing the kind of work that can't require you to put any mental attention towards your clothes) but you might wear your best-information-transmitting jeans, by which I mean that you might put on a pair of jeans that effectively demonstrates your external and internal organization.

Are you still following me?

I am doing all of this so that I can write the King's song, later –

And now I will tell you the other story I remember from that Christmas, the one where I wanted to use a $50 savings bond to buy fries for everyone I loved, and that's that later in the holiday my mother and my grandmother went out shopping, and they asked me whether I wanted to come along and I said no because I wanted to play with the "Clean" and "Dirty" magnets on my grandmother's dishwasher (the "Clean" magnet was a little girl, and the "Dirty" magnet was a little boy, we all know what might have interested a five-year-old about those two images [they also paralleled the "Blue Boy" and "Pinkie" reproductions that adorned either side of my grandmother's television]) and the point is that my mother came back with a pair of pink-and-white shorts that she had bought for me and I started crying because shorts are fundamentally ugly and we know that because you can think, right now, of all the places and situations in which you wouldn't wear shorts, and I knew that when I was five years old.

I was also crying because I knew, at five years old, that now I wouldn't be able to get something else I may have wanted because these shorts that I didn't want had already been bought for me, and to my mother's credit (not knowing anything that happened on her end of the exchange) she may have known that I would hate them but might have experienced pressure from her own mother to buy them, etc. etc. etc.

But I didn't know that McDonald's fries were expensive in terms of their information value, I just thought they were a tasty thing I didn't get to eat very often, and that may have had something to do with my not being able to buy them myself, and it may be why teenagers buy burgers and milkshakes and sodas and fries as soon as they have extra cash, and it's also probably why those are price-pointed the way they are, and then the fast-food restaurants and the candy makers and the soda makers are always coming out with new flavors, because if you can keep a person interested in novelty you can keep them (and their families) for decades, and you don't need me to explain this any more because you can run the rest of the argument in your own mind.

I really should open comments but I'm not going to, I think I've written what I need to write to be able to close this drawer (with the ugly shorts inside) and if you have anything to tell me you may email me at nicole@nicolediekerfinley.com and now now now now now I am ready to work on the King's song.