The menu conundrum …

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Going out to dinner is a great American pastime. During one such outing, while considering your menu options, you may have ever so briefly noticed an odd choice of sides for your meal, or you may have had a friendly server ask while taking your order:

“Would you like a salad or fries with that?”

There could hardly be a more contradictory choice of foods than selecting either a salad or french fries!

You don’t have to be a registered dietitian to know: salad = good for you, fries = not good for you.

And so you’re faced with a conundrum, a puzzling choice. Do you order what is good for your body, or something that tastes good but isn’t good for your body?

Okay, it’s not an earth-shattering decision. It would be a wise choice to order the salad, but an occasional serving of fries isn’t going to wreck your health or knock you down a fitness level. But if you’re routinely reasoning, “Life is short, I’ll have the fries!” a constant diet of junk food (like fries) can not only affect your fitness, but can eventually negatively impact your health.

The Apostle Paul had to address concerns about a different kind of food choice in his first letter to the Corinthians, and there’s a sentence as part of his response that is helpful to us today:

“You say, ‘I am allowed to do anything’ — but not everything is good for you. You say, ‘I am allowed to do anything’ — but not everything is beneficial,” 1 Corinthians 10:23.

We tell ourselves that we’re allowed to anything we want! But not everything is good or beneficial for us. Knowing that truth, and using it to exercise wisdom in our choices enables us to be good stewards of our bodies and the lives God blesses us with.

While Paul points us to making decisions that are good and beneficial, we often make decisions from reasoning that is as contradictory to that as choosing between french fries or a salad; we tend to overly value real or perceived losses (not having those delicious fries) and under-value positive gains (a healthy salad). Gary Belsky provides an example from one of his articles written for Money:

    You’ve been given a free ticket to a football game. A snowstorm the night before makes the drive to the stadium risky. Would you go?

    Okay: same game, same snowstorm — except this time you paid $100 for the ticket. Now would you go?

    According to University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler, people are more likely to take a risk if they paid for the ticket. But, as Thaler points out, “The fact that you spent $100 shouldn’t matter when you decide between the reward of seeing the game and the risk of getting killed.”

    Two all-too human tendencies come into play here. The first is the “sunk-cost fallacy” — the idea that having paid for something, you had better not waste it, no matter what the consequences. The second is “loss aversion” — the fact that people place about twice as much significance on a loss as on a gain. In other words, they are twice as unhappy about losing $100 as they are pleased about making $100.

We so easily make the choice for fries because we don’t want to miss out on the opportunity of a pleasure, instead of thinking about how we have the opportunity to gain a benefit of something good from a salad (which can be delicious, too!).

So, to apply Paul’s words to your own life: you may say you can do anything, but not everything is good or beneficial. How are you going to use that knowledge going forward in the choices you make?

There really isn’t much of a conundrum to it, is there?

Scotty