Friday, January 16, 2009

Why is food soo darn good!!!!!!-Where I pose a challenge!!

This morning, I was looking at restaurants on facebook for no good reason and looked at the top restaurants in facebook. Get this, McDonalds has the #1, #3, and #4 positions. If you assume that nobody is in more than one facebook mcdonalds fan club that comes to 1,656,606 fans of McDonalds on Facebook.

I'm sure you have all seen those groups trying to get one million people to join. When I first saw one of those I figured, sure we could build a group with a million people to join, but after time i realized it's more difficult than it sounds. After seeing McDonalds on facebook I now know that it takes a ridiculous amount of time and money to be that popular.

Anyways, on to the real reason I wanted to write this note. Except for a rare few, it seems like nobody actually likes McDonalds (at least is seemed so). My friends and I always chose chipotle or subway over McDonalds unless it's too late for those places (in which case we would choose burger king over mcdonalds). Facebook has shown me that in fact people really do like McDonalds. Even though it's food is greasy, low quality, unhealthy in general, and not that great tasting.

I always thought that McDonalds was just everybody's deep dark secret. I knew that they are the biggest food company in the world so they must be getting their money from somewhere (cuz I try my darndest to avoid going there so I'm definitely not contributing).

Mmmmm grease
In my 21 years of existence I have noticed a few things about food and I shall describe it using this equation:

ArcTan(Carbs+Fat+Salt)=Happiness

This can be seen in foods such as gooey butter cakes, cookies, frosting, pizza, hamburgers, french fries, hash browns, creme brulette (sorry kalen for butchering the spelling) as well as my favorite...sugar coated butter sticks. Some people might argue that meat should be included in the equation, but I would argue that you get your happiness from the fat that is in the meat (or other flavoring) and not actually from the meat itself.

I will now explain graphically my theory relating carbs, fat, and salt to happiness. Since I don't know how to graph in 4D I'm going to simplify the equation by ignoring salt, but you can imagine that salt has a similar effect on happiness. Here is the plot relating carbs, fat and happiness:


You can see that happiness increases with increased amounts of carbs and fat. Makes sense huh? The plot does flatten out eventually, which means that Marginal Utility for eating more fat and carbs gets lower with the more food you eat. We have all seen this when we go to our favorite pizza place and after 8 pieces or so it's just not as enjoyable per piece.

Now some of you huge nerds may say, "Wait a second, ArcTan approaches pi/2 as carbs and fat go to infinity. Therefore,true happiness must occur at pi/2 units of utility" To that I would respond, "Ah very astute of you young padwan. That is a good guess, but true happiness actually occurs at 1.4 units of utility" So I challenge you reader if you think that carbs and fat (and salt) can give you true happiness, go ahead and see if you can reach true happiness. Just don't sue me when you get a heart attack.

For those of you who are up to the challenge, I have graphed my happiness plot (orangish) next to the plane of true happiness(blue).


We will assume that the plane of true happiness is at 1.4 units of utility. If you eat equal amounts of carbs and fat (in arbitrary units) you should achieve true happiness at 2.89894 units of carbs and fat.

In my 21 years of existence I have not achieved true happiness by eating so I suspect that I have not eaten 2.89894 units of carbs and fat. Please let me know if you have achieved true happiness by this method for it would give me great joy to see if my theory is true.

As a side note, I believe that if you actually eat good food (not McDonalds), you can approach the plane of true happiness at a faster rate. I am looking for a few adventurous risk takers who would be up to the challenge of comparing good foods like Chipotle to bad foods like McDonalds and seeing which one leads to true happiness in less time.

Happy Eating!