Some time last year, a few American schools and colleges, worried about obesity in students, tried a blindingly simple experiment: they took away the canteen trays. It was a simple thing, but the effects were impressive. Because they couldn’t take more back to their seats than they could easily balance on an arm, students couldn’t make impulse purchases of muffins, extra large sodas or appetising kilogram blocks of refined animal fat. They could carry one plate and maybe a small drink to their table and, once they’d consumed that, they faced an active 10m trek back up to the counter for dessert of high fructose corn syrup in a deep fried pastry bucket.
It’s brilliant. Can you imagine the intellectual torture? “I really want to gratify myself by sucking up more ghastly pap but how do counterbalance that desire with my abject terror of actually getting off my grotesquely fat arse and going to get it?” They say the students lost pounds because they ate less - I reckon they burned up the calories just thinking that hard.
