#848 Digital Food

Well it’s finally happened. In a land where every entertainment format has gone from the smooth natural continuous wave of analog to the crystal brittleness of digital could our last pastime hold out for long?
No. Food is finally digital.
As in, by the digits we call numbers. Digits, numerals, you name it, it’s the solution to dietary confusion—food by the numbers. The plan? Make shopping simple for the average consumer.
There’s negative news about this food, and cancer-preventative good news about that. High glycemic index here, low HDL there. What’s a shopper to do?
Math of course. Take all the competing info and assign a number to an article of food to indicate positive or negative value. Researchers at Yale University’s Griffin Prevention Research Center set their grant money to work and created the Overall Nutritional Quality Index, or ONQI for short.
ONQI as in Honky. As in, it takes a soulless yankee wasp mathlete to try to reduce food to numbers. Dude.
The values are arranged from 1 to 100. 1 being bad and 100 being good. The top of the list is what you might expect. Raw broccoli. It has 100 points. So does an orange.
Yeah yeah, what about the good stuff? Bagels are 23, Salted, dry-roasted peanuts are a mere 21. Interestingly, at 44, a New York Strip Steak comes in higher than a skinless chicken breast at 39.
Of course my first thought, since they are using a mathematical algorithm to come up with this list, is do other mathematical principles apply?
Like, oh, I don’t know, the additive property.
Can I eat a burger at 24, slather on some peanut butter at 23, slap on a slab of Swiss cheese at 17, mayo at 21, add a side of cheese puffs at 4, some dessert chocolate for 10, and wash it down with a soda for 1, and still get the same benefit as the equal-numbered serving of broccoli at 100?
Cause, you know, I’d like the variety, and, um, taste a little more.
So tell me this; what happens to the numbers next time I go to the store and there’s been an E-Coli outbreak on raw broccoli?
America, ya gotta love it.