Here’s a real-world puzzle: You and your friends are on a road-trip and you stop at a pizza place for some dinner. You have two men, two women and a 13-year-old boy. The pizza parlour serves small, medium and large pizzas. How many pizzas of each size should you order?<\/p>\n
Is that too hard? How about an easier one: Which is larger? Two medium pizzas or one family pizza?<\/p>\n
I put it to you that the fact that you cannot answer these questions strongly indicates that self-regulation of the Italian meal industry has failed us, and it is time for the government to impose its own standards. When I am President of Australia, all pizza parlours will need to conform to national pizza size standards (or international, if I can persuade other countries to sign bilateral treaties.)<\/p>\n
Research will need to be done on the exact nature of the standards. <\/p>\n
My first thought was that there should there be clearly defined standard of what Personal, Small, Medium, Large and Family sizes. I’d prefer not to go this route, as this would fail to stamp out the contradictory practice of having “medium” as the smallest size available.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the nutritionists would argue that the pizzas should be standardised by fat content rather than size. For example, an “adult female regular” unit of pizza might be the size required to meet at most 50% of the recommended daily intake of kilojoules or sodium for a typical active adult female. I suspect the industry lobbiests and the public would be horrified by such a practice, and it may be technically tricky to create pizzas whose choice of toppings affect the diameter.<\/p>\n
I considered using a negative log scale, like ISO paper sizes. An P0 pizza might have an area of 1 m2<\/sup>. A P1 pizza would have an area of m2<\/sup>. A P2 pizza would have an area of 0.25 sq metres, and so on. Larger numbers indicating smaller sizes may confuse the public though.<\/p>\n No, perhaps the simplest would be to measure the pizza’s area in S.I. units. It may be an unconventional unit, but dm2<\/sup> is probably the most comfortable, with 2 dm2<\/sup> being about a large slice of pizza. A typical individual plate of pizza might then be a size 6 (11″ diameter = 2.8 dm diameter \u00e2\u2030\u00a1 1.4 dm radius \u00e2\u2030\u00a1 6.1 dm2<\/sup> area), with a large pizza being a size 13. <\/p>\n Each individual could then learn what their personal capacity is. (“I’m not hungry. I couldn’t eat more than 4.”) Sum them up, and you have your answer.<\/p>\n Doing this research will take time. In the meantime, pizza parlours will be required to assist the transition with a simpler solution that I feel, quite frankly, the market should have reached long ago. When ordering pizzas for a large group – especially over the phone – the customer should state their requirements in the problem domain, not the solution domain. Simply, an order should go like this: “I have 7 adults, 3 kids. Two of them are vegetarians. We are pretty hungry. So, deliver us enough pizza to feed us, with enough variety that everyone can find some they like, and stop forcing the decisions onto us, when you know better than we do.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I put it to you that the fact that you cannot simple questions about pizza sizes strongly indicates that self-regulation of the Italian meal industry has failed us, and it is time for the government to impose its own standards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[24,21,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cathartic-rant","category-observation","category-thoughts-from-the-shower"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1507"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1511,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1507\/revisions\/1511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}