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I disagree with that xkcd comic, mostly on what he means by "easy". There's more to ease of eating food than whether you can just bite into it or if you have to peel it first (or seeds). By his reckoning, a candy bar would be harder to eat than an apple, because you have to unwrap it.

I think the first time I noticed a food was difficult to eat was when I was a child and ate granola cereal (or Fruit and Fiber, which I don't think they make anymore). The trick to eating that is to just barely cover the bottom of the bowl. If I filled the whole bowl with cereal, eating it somehow became a chore. It's not that I was necessarily full, but the act of eating was *difficult*.

When I was in Florida, one day for lunch I had a tray of fruit. No matter how much fruit you get, it's probably not gonna have as many calories as a Big Mac, say. But, damn, it was difficult to eat! I felt kind of exhausted by the end.


I'm not sure what makes some foods harder to eat than others, but my first hypothesis tonight is that it could be related to homogeneity. Most processed foods are really easy to eat. They're easy to bite into, chew, swallow, and eat any amount you want. And that's probably because they're processed to be homogenized.

Fruit, on the other hand, is difficult to eat because it's not homogeneous. It has grains, fibers, pulp, juices. An apple seems fairly homogeneous (once you get through the skin), but on the other hand, it's difficult to bite into. I don't think you'll find anything at McDonalds that's that difficult to bite into.

Bananas -- cultivated bananas, that is -- are usually pretty homogeneous, and are pretty easy to eat. Sometimes, though, I get a weird banana that's really fibrous in the middle, and it's almost impossible to eat.

Even for unhealthy stuff, sometimes something that's homogeneous is easier to eat than something that's not. It's probably a little easier to eat a Milky Way than a Snickers.

I guess there are things that contradict my homogeneous hypothesis. Like, subs, with lettuce and tomatoes and meat and bread, are composed of different things. And pizza doesn't seem homogeneous, either. On the other hand, both are at least usually soft. Homogeneous and soft might be the real criteria. Maybe another would be, if you bite into it, does the bite cut right through? A tomato is soft, but it deforms when you bite it before it breaks. A pineapple, on the other hand, is a little more firm, but you bite right through it. After a pineapple has been husked, it's probably no more difficult to eat than a tomato, and might be a little easier, even.


Another thing that makes fruit difficult to eat is that it doesn't keep well. You got up to maybe three days. When I was a kid, we would have fruit cocktail with dinner, and sometimes the fruit, right from a freshly opened can, was already fermented and inedible. Psychologically, it is very difficult to eat a banana with brown spots. Actually, psychologically, it's very difficult to eat any food after you've had a bad example of it -- this is supposed to be an evolutionary advantage, to keep cavemen from eating something poisonous at least more than once -- and fruit goes bad so easily you've almost certainly had a bad piece of every sort of fruit you've tried.