Confident that nobody would notice what he was doing, Michael Nicod spent months inside the homes of families he didn’t know, making detailed notes about everything they ate. Nicod was performing research for Britain’s Department of Health and Social Security in 1974. He and his colleague, University College London professor Mary Douglas, wrote a report called Taking the Biscuit: The Structure of British Meals.
Nicod and Douglas desired to identify what typical British persons see because the essential parts in their typical meals. The pair drew on their training as anthropologists: “We imagined a dietician in an unknown Papuan or African tribe wondering the best way to introduce a brand new, reinforcing element into tribal diet. We assumed that the dietician’s first task can be to find how the tribe ‘structured’ their food.”
Nicod lived as a lodger with “four working-class families where the top was engaged in unskilled manual labour”, in East Finchley, Durham, Birmingham and Coventry. He stayed in each place not less than a month, “watching every mouthful and sharing whenever possible”.
Nicod and Douglas express confidence within the obliviousness of the natives. “We reckon”, they write, “that once 10 days of this kind of discreet and incurious presence, the foremost sensitive housewife, busy together with her children, settles all the way down to her routine menus.”
Many others have imagined new tips on how to examine and alter the eating habits of persons aside from themselves.
In 2006, Mariana Simons-Nikolova and Maarten Bodlaender of the Netherlands applied for a patent for an electro-mechanical process they call Modifying a person’s eating and activity habits. Their video/computer system would monitor an individual’s head and hands to detect once they were eating. It will then announce to them via the television or computer, “You might be Now Eating”.
Simons-Nikolova and Bodlaender explain: “By providing the feedback when the topic remains eating or drinking, the topic is helped to forestall the eating or drinking ahead of if no feedback were given.”
A 2008 patent by three Israeli inventors describes “a sensor which detects: (a) the patient swallowing, (b) the filling of the patient’s stomach, and/or (c) the onset of contractions within the stomach attributable to eating”. Electric current can then, for dietary reasons, be “driven into muscle tissues of the subject’s stomach”. This “induces within the subject a sensation of satiation, discomfort, nausea, or vertigo”.
Three Indian inventors filed a patent application in 2010 for a “refrigerator for obese persons”. The fridge monitors “all eating and drinking”, and dispenses diet advice. Also, “a reflecting mirror film at the door makes the man to govern overeating once he stands before the fridge”.
With these and related plans does society become more equipped for “watching every mouthful” of a few of its members.
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prizes. The Ig Nobel tour of the united kingdom starts on 13 March. For additional info, visit www.improbable.com
