Two kinds of diet

I have learnt a lot about two kinds of diet on this cruise – one that I’m on and one that I’m not. The diet I’m on is an Internet diet. At home (where like most middle-class folks in the developed world) I have an ADSL (broadband) connection which provides me with all the Internet I can eat for a very reasonable monthly fee. While on ship I have several (all not ideal )alternatives:

- the Costa Internet terminals – cost $5 for 10 minutes for speeds reminding one of 33600 bps modems (if anyone can remember that far back) and neutered access that doesn’t enable copy/paste or multiple windows

- access from my laptop with a Thuraya satellite phone I have – cost $5 for each megabyte (I discovered that just loading a few Gmail pages already ate my first megabyte….) . Also the connection is very spotty to say the least, and I have to be up on deck in the wind for it to work at all

- access via GPRS from my mobile phone PDA (only in port or close to land) . Through my Israeli cellular provider, Orange, this would cost almost $10 /megabyte – with a Spanish SIM I got, it’s cheaper. But the screen is small and text entry and access are slow.

So I have to ration myself and suddenly I realize that I am on mailing lists I never read but never bothered to cancel. One becomes more selective and conscious of priorities. This can not be said for the diet that I’m not on on the cruise, namely food. You may have heard that on cruises they provide you with more food than even the greatest gluttons could eat and at this at almost every waking hour. I calculated that between 07:00 and 01:00 there are only 3 hours when you do not have free access to all the food you can stuff. This is a tragedy. Although some us can no longer eat the quantities we once could and most of us are aware (at least theoretically) of the health implications of unhealthy eating, we all (and I speak for all 1300 passengers on board) overeat.

Any economist will tell you that any resource which is not differentially priced (i.e. is “ free” or all included) will not be consumed optimally. So here we are all consuming suboptimally and then wondering about our waistlines when we get home. It is a long tradition that cruises provide all-you-can-eat as-many meals-as-you-can-manage included in the cruise price, but I, for one, would be happy if they changed that. I’m not necessarily suggesting that we should have to pay (money) for every meal but they should think up a way of making us aware of the ‘price’ of what we eat, even if it’s only the ‘price’ in calories.

Now if they would reverse priorities – providing unlimited high-speed Internet and priced food, that would be a thing. Costa, take note.