Shakespeare’s Falstaff has a memorable speech about the virtues of eating and drinking: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”

I think he was wrong about what it takes to be perfect. If you want to be perfect, don’t follow him. Rotate your food.

Most of what I write about risk is about financial risk, but there are plenty of other kinds. You can have too much debt, or too much sugar in your blood, or too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But if you are overweight or sick or poor, it is unlikely that you are taking excessive physical risks–you are not wandering around on a ledge or swimming with sharks. Rather, you are consuming more than you need. Or at least more than you need right now–maybe what you really need is to be hungrier now so that later you will have something to eat.

The problem with consuming too much is not just that it makes you fat or kills you; it kills the people around you as well. If they are supporting your lifestyle, either directly through gifts or indirectly through government programs, they will die younger.

I have a friend who keeps a bowl of candy on his kitchen table, and when he’s done with a piece, instead of eating it he spins it in the bowl to randomize the pieces. Then he eats the randomized candy.

This is a great example of an everyday thing you could make better with a little cleverness. It’s hard to go wrong with candy, but by making your choices random, you improve the odds that you’ll get something you don’t already know you like best.

The key to this technique is using some kind of procedure to pick an option at random without subconsciously influencing the outcome. If you choose some option at random and it happens to be the one you prefer, then your brain will start liking it more because it has been rewarded. You can avoid this bias by never choosing anything in particular or making sure that every choice is equally likely to be picked.

I think the food version of this technique is called “rotating your crops” or something like that; I’ve seen it advocated for growing vegetables. The idea is that if you plant things in your garden in random order, then pests will treat all your plants equally and you won’t get an epidemic on one crop before it has had time to spread its seed around

I was once in a restaurant that rotated its food. A waitress would bring you a steak, and when it had been sitting under the lamps for twenty minutes, she would whisk it away and replace it with another. I was irritated, because I hadn’t yet finished my first one.

When someone offers you a gift, you are supposed to say “thank you.” But is there any point in thanking someone for giving you something that isn’t dangerous or offensive?

Your kitchen is a kind of time machine. Food that goes in one end emerges radically changed—different in form, color, and apparent texture. But unlike a time machine invented by a science fiction writer, it does not transport you to the future; it transports your future to you.

The kitchen time machine works by grinding and chemically altering its cargo with incredible force. A typical household blender spins its contents at about 30,000 rpm—a speed that creates a centrifugal force strong enough to fling a small child across a room. And the food doesn’t just spin around in random directions: it’s forced into a counterclockwise corkscrew shape that makes it all fit neatly into the jar.

There is a catch to the way Homo sapiens handles food. The other animals we eat can run away; they can defend themselves; they’re not sitting still for us to come to them with knives and forks.

Hence there is a limit to how much meat we can eat: we have to spend time and energy hunting and killing it. If we didn’t, we would eat everything we could get hold of, and starve.

The other animals we farm — cows and pigs and chickens — don’t run away. In fact, they are positively eager to be killed and eaten, because that’s their biological function: they are baby-making machines that turn plant food into animal protein. So there is no limit to how much meat we can consume if we have a steady supply of these animals, or at least their meat, from our farms.

We have solved the problem of feeding ourselves without having to kill all the animals in sight. But there is a practical problem. When you buy a cow or pig or chicken at the market, what you get is a dead body. You have to throw away most of it — the parts that have been sitting around since the animal died — before you can use any of it.

I am writing this on a laptop that I bought in 2007. It’s about to die. And I can’t be bothered to get it fixed, because I have a new one that works perfectly well.

The Apple laptop was expensive, but not outrageously so — maybe $1500 at the time. It was still working fine when Apple released its successor, which cost more than twice as much. But my old laptop couldn’t run the new operating system. If I wanted to keep using it, I would have had to pay some expert to upgrade the software. So I got a new one instead.

I got another new one this year, when Apple released its successor, which cost more than twice as much again. And again the manufacturer of my old machine didn’t support the operating system on their own hardware.

We often say that time is money, but in fact money is time. We buy things to save us time. The more money you make, the more time you can buy — at least until you get rich enough to retire.

That’s why rich people spend so much on servants. A servant is someone who takes your money and gives you some of her time in return.

This also explains why poor countries are poor; there, people don’t have servants. They do all their own work themselves, so they have no extra time to trade for food or clothing or books or leisure activities.

But if money buys time, then the problem is not that the U.S. is rich and India is poor; it’s that the government spends your tax money on things other than servants for you. If the government hired you to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles for $100K a year, thereby giving you $100K of spending money that otherwise would have been wasted on DMV employees, that would be better for everyone than any foreign aid program imaginable.”