How many dosas can you eat?

I decided to test my favourite food-related hypothesis. My hypothesis is based on my own behaviour as well as my family and friends.

My hypothesis is as follows.

We tend to eat more of a food item – say dosas – when we eat at home and less when we eat the same item in a restaurant.

Thus I would be satisfied with one dosa in a restaurant but would not be satisfied with less than three at home!

I decided to test if this was peculiar to me and others I know or if this was more common.

I sent a team of young college students to visit many restaurants in Chennai other than 5 star hotels. The team talked to diners after they had finished a meal of dosas and asked them why they had eaten only one dosa. Most diners were sheepish and embarassed but opened up with some cajoling.

The conclusion reached by the students based on their survey was:

Almost all respondents surveyed agreed that they would have eaten more dosas – varying from two to four –at home.

They ate less at hotel because they found it unaffordable. They felt that it was less expensive to prepare a dosa at home.

They ate dosas – or any other item for that matter – in a restaurant for fun and a change or when hunger came up suddenly or to entertain someone.

When asked to what extent it would have cost less to make a dosa at home they could not give any figures but were sure it was so.

All this is fairly predictable but I have a psychological explanation. People usually react to change in a parameter rather than the parameter itself. Thus eating many dosas at home does not register as an incremental cost to the monthly budget (unless taken to extremes) but when the waiter at a restaurant presents a bill it registers as a clear increase in one’s monthly expenses. The prospect of the bill showing up tickles the centre of your brain that governs the food satisfaction cells. Thus your limited financial resources make your brain signal satisfaction to your stomach after maybe one dosa. ‘Enough is enough’ says your brain to your stomach and you feel satisfied after one dosa.

In other words you react to the INCREMENTAL CHANGE in your expenses budget that eating out entails. I dare to suggest that we eat more if someone else foots the bill. Just remember your last meal at a wedding! Diners at 5-star hotels are usually expense account people and the brain works differently in such situations!
Look at another insight.

A friend of mine, a US-based NRI, once visited me at my Chennai home. It was December and the city was experiencing an unusual fall in temperature to the extent that some slum dwellers died. My NRI friend was amused to see people die at a temperature that he said would be called a ‘heat wave’ in his part of the US. I told him that people react to change in temperature rather than absolute temperature. Thus Chennaites are used to hot weather throughout the year averaging at above 30º celsius. When the temperature fell to 19º the poor, unhealthy and unprotected by even a shirt could not handle this CHANGE in temperature.

My friend seemed unconvinced. As bad luck would have it a few months later he told me that several people in his US city died when the summer temperature rose to 35 º Celsius – something that may not be called a heat wave in Chennai but was called so in the US city. Once again the people who died in the US city were poor, aged or sick people who could not afford air-conditioning.

I recall how shocked I was when I was first diagnosed to have diabetes. The change in my health status alarmed me. I consulted my astrologer friend to find what I needed to do to stave off danger. He told me that diabetes would bother me for only two years.

“Do you mean to say that after two years I would be cured?”

But my doctor said, “It cannot be cured. I did not say that you would be cured. I was trying to tell you that after two tears you would get used to the ailment and it would not bother you any more!”

Let me reach for my rasgoolas for a CHANGE!