I’m not sure if burgers and fries are addictive. What’s the line between “I like that” and addiction? That’s a hard one for me to tackle, so I’m perfectly willing to let that challenge of Bittman go. As for “why does decision fatigue explain why some people order grease”, a couple of the most interesting paragraphs from the link in my previous comment…

Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making. In the rest of the animal kingdom, there aren’t a lot of protracted negotiations between predators and prey. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying). Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav, the Stanford professor, demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars.

Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people in poverty. Because their financial situation forces them to make so many trade-offs, they have less willpower to devote to school, work and other activities that might get them into the middle class. It’s hard to know exactly how important this factor is, but there’s no doubt that willpower is a special problem for poor people. Study after study has shown that low self-control correlates with low income as well as with a host of other problems, including poor achievement in school, divorce, crime, alcoholism and poor health. Lapses in self-control have led to the notion of the “undeserving poor” — epitomized by the image of the welfare mom using food stamps to buy junk food — but Spears urges sympathy for someone who makes decisions all day on a tight budget.

Exceptions exist of course—emergency room neurosurgeon, ruler of a country under attack, death penalty defensive attorney. But on average, the average white collar or Eileen Fisher executive has less stress, less abuse, and more reward than your average blue collar worker desperately trying to hang on to a minimum wage job.

Re cooking fatigue: I like the idea of whipping up delightfully simple yet delicious and healthy meals for the family. It’s the inexorability of 3 meals/day X 7 days per week X 52 weeks per year that gets to me. Hence the unending search for the versatile, reasonably priced, consistent nearby family dining choice.

Anyway, of course not all situations are created equal. So what? The guy who works two jobs understandably does not want to spend 45 minutes making a meal. But the white collar guy who gets home from work at 8:30 doesn’t want to, either. Either of these guys can get a healthy meal at McD’s just as fast and as easily as they can get a burger and fries. Why does decision fatigue explain why some people always seem to order the grease? And from an obseity standpoint, you have to factor in the almost lack of exercise, too. Are some people so fatigued that they can’t ever be expected to do the “right” thing? Hitting the drive thru a few times a week is one thing. Living a sedentary lifestyle is another.

And what does our hypothetical man’s pay have to do with it? Making more money does not necessarily mean your self-discipline is taxed to a lesser degree. High-paying jobs require huge amounts of sacrifice and self-disclipline, both in terms of doing what is required to get them and then performing to the level expected of someone making six figures. I’m not sure decision fatigue can explain all of that, though you may well have studied it more than I have.

I’ve been known to say on this site before that people watch a lot of TV each day and that time could – in THEORY – be used for cooking for nutritious food at a low price. But more recently I’ve read some stuff on “decision fatigue” and realized that there’s no simple answer to getting people to “cook more”. We’re an overworked society with a quick and easy option for eating. That’s new to the human race, and not something we’ve adapted to yet. Forget all the marketing and low prices, ease, I’ve come to believe, is the key factor that drives fast food sales.

But anyway, let’s dig into your argument a bit. When it comes to self-control and self-reliance, do you believe that everyone’s situation is created equal? That a man with two low-paying jobs should have the same levels of self-control as you or I? Research – in the link above – seems to point towards no. And if self-control is relative, not just to the person but because of the environment in which one lives, should it really be relied on to dictate universal principles?

-MxPx