Business Opportunities Weblog

June 7, 2004 by Dane Carlson | 1 Comment

Philip Greenspun:

Consider the process of going to a restaurant. You, a completely ignorant and probably somewhat fat person, walk in and they hand you a long menu of potential dishes. For each dish the menu lists a tiny fraction of the ingredients but does not fully disclose sauces or overall calories. Even if the content of each item were fully disclosed it wouldn’t do most of us much good because most of us don’t know how many calories are appropriate. Finally there is the problem that everyone gets the same quantity of food. If you’re a 5′-tall woman and order “Chicken surprise” you get the same quantity of food as a 6′-tall man who orders the same dish.

Here’s an idea for a restaurant… You walk in and give them the following information: (1) height, (2) weight, and (3) whether or not you have exercised today. They come back to you with a few choices, e.g., “fish, chicken, steak, or vegetarian?” You choose one of those and finally an appropriately-sized quantity of food shows up on your table. This is, I think, how the $1000/day fat farms operate. But in an age of computerization it doesn’t seem as though it would cost a standard restaurant anything more to operate this way.

via Scripting News.

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