A new easy-to-follow diet plan: just replace your silverware with the new “brambles and thorns” style!

Sep 30, 2024

awkward cutlery, bad silverware, diet plan, dubious flatware, fork, jagged cutlery, knife, spoon, utensils

The Issue:

Modern food has been optimized for deliciousness and ease-of-eating. Unfortunately, this makes it easy to quickly devour an entire plate of food. This is bad news for dieting and portion control.

Proposal:

Dieting plans typically focus on the type and quantity of food being eaten.

Strangely, these plans rarely look at the utensils involved in eating. Let’s remedy that, with a new dieting plan that ignores food entirely and simply updates the utensils to be more difficult and time-consuming to use (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: The regular utensils (left) have been optimized for efficiency and user-friendliness, which is the opposite of what we want. The “brambles and thorns”-style utensils (right) have barbs and sharp edges that require the dining individual to be careful.

It seems so obvious, but no one has tried to solve dieting from this angle before!

These new utensils will make every bite of food a deliberate decision, which should make it easier to avoid over-eating.

Conclusion:

A slightly cheaper version of this system would be to just use chopsticks for everything (assuming the food-devouring individual is not already a chopstick expert). However, this might only be a temporary solution, since chopstick proficiency would presumably soon be gained.

PROS: Could improve national fitness and reduce obesity.

CONS: Might make dinner parties awkward and/or painful.

Originally published 2024-09-30.