The methodology is quite simple. Once I’ve got all my groceries, I go to the same spot near the checkouts. To avoid biasing myself, I check my cell phone to determine whether to go through the self checkouts or the normal checkouts. Because my cell phone lacks a random number generator, I check the last digit of the time: an even digit means I go through the normal checkout and an odd digit means I go through self checkout. I then start the stopwatch and time how long it takes for me to go through the checkout and leave the store.

I’ve got 31 data points and have finally decided that if one type of checkout is faster than the other, the difference is small enough to not really matter. Here’s the scatterplot:

A sample size of 31 is unimpressive, to be sure, but it’s large enough that I can finally rest easy knowing it would be a waste of time to collect more data. Trying to get out of the grocery store in the fastest way possible seems to have more important factors, such as the number of jerks ahead of you in line.

As a side note on how that scatterplot is presented, it probably would have made a lot more sense to measure the time taken as a function of how many items I bought, rather than the cash value of the items I bought. I’m far too lazy to count things, though.

So, from now on I’ll be deciding on self checkout versus normal checkout based on how social I’m feeling. I suspect that means I’ll be using the self checkout a lot.

Jasna’s vegetarian and I’m semi-vegetarian (“flexitarian”, Wikipedia informs me), only because I’m a picky eater and the vegetarian options outside of what we prepare at home often aren’t great.

Environmental reasons are certainly the primary reasons for both of us. Meat is inherently inefficient: for most animals humans eat, it takes somewhere around 10 Calories of plant matter to make 1 Calorie of animal matter and it would make a lot of sense environmentally—and probably economically as well—to cut out the middle man and just eat the 10 Calories of plant matter. That inefficiency leads to increase land usage, water usage, soil erosion, etc. There are other environmental problems, such as sewage and methane emissions.

Well today I was lamenting to myself that there really is no resource for finding out exactly what the environmental costs of foods are! To be sure, drawing the line at meat is a little arbitrary. Vegetarian food, especially meat alternatives like TVP, can go through a lot of processing and, for all I know in my ignorance, end up being just as bad as meat. On the other side, for all I know, also in my ignorance, there are some meats out there that really aren’t a big problem at all.

So I have a vision: what if there were a wiki that allowed consolidating information and maybe even original research into what the environmental costs of foods are?

I don’t know if it’s practical at all. To gauge interest I did my best at asking an unbiased survey while keeping an eye on the “Environmental damage from husbandry” option. My biggest fear is I’d just be creating a website for myself that no one else will ever read; I already have one of those.

The closest thing I’ve found to what I’m looking for is foodorigins but it’s not really aiming at the same thing.

I don’t know. I’ll mull it over for a while longer. At stake is $10 for a domain registration and however long it takes to set up a wiki these days.