There is an inescapable truth in the world of food: today, more than ever, we have at our disposal an enormous variety of fresh, prepared, ready-to-eat, imported foods, with exotic ingredients, of foreign or national manufacture, etc. Almost everyone has an experience related to this phenomenon: Do you remember when a certain candy or highly prized ingredient had to be brought by someone traveling to other places? What about foods and preparations that are now so common for some people in urban contexts? I particularly remember the first time I ate sushi as a child, at an international food fair. That black seaweed wrap was exotic, but fun and something never before seen in my narrow culinary imagination at age seven. It only took a few years for sushi to become Mexicanized and turn into a food you can find at street corner stalls in Mexico City.
Today, we have to choose everything. Gone are the days when marriages were more of an arrangement between families, a civil contract with all kinds of interests in view. Conjugal love as a basis for marriage is a notion that, in the history of humanity, is of recent appearance. Today, we are also not obliged to continue our parents’ profession. In this way, we must make important life decisions regarding our partner, profession, job, the city where we want to live, family planning, our children’s school, etc. All this sounds relatively beneficial in the search for self-fulfillment. But in addition to all these decisions, today we must decide on the most trivial aspects of daily life: the cut of our jeans, the phone plan that suits us best, the phone model, the speed of our internet, the app that best monitors our heart rate during exercise, the place we will go out to... and an endless number of daily decisions, among them, of course, what I am going to eat today. And this is where things get more interesting. Psychologist Barry Schwartz is one of the first researchers to empirically describe, and later with hard data, the effects of having so many options in everyday life. This idea is called the paradox of choice, and it goes more or less like this: The more options a person has regarding a particular matter, the more dissatisfaction they feel with their choice. According to this psychologist, the proliferation of options in daily life leaves people with feelings of unhappiness. In many ways, measuring this scientifically can be controversial, as not many psychologists agree with the standardization of happiness scales—in other words, the instruments used to measure how happy a person is. In this sense, studies have been conducted in the field of food that yield particularly interesting results.
For example: You have the option to go to a restaurant. There are two well-rated restaurants, with good chefs, similar prices, good atmosphere, and all conditions alike, except for one difference. In one, there is a menu with a great variety of dishes for all tastes: vegan, pasta, salads, meats, tacos, sushi, etc. In the other, the menu is basically limited to five dishes recommended by a chef. Which would you choose? Obviously, besides the menu, the answer depends on factors like company, proximity, etc. But referring to an answer in an experimental context where all variables are equal except for the menu, cultural particularities have been found. Another example in this same context of the study of the paradox of choice is the following: There are two ice cream shops with ice creams at the same price. One offers 50 flavors of ice cream, the other 10. In which ice cream shop would you buy your ice cream? The researchers of this survey found that, surprisingly, people in the United States preferred more options, in contrast to people in France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Beyond a cultural component, we must also remember that the socio-historical contexts of the surveyed countries provide different interpretations. For example, we know that our northern neighbors pride themselves on being a nation of freedom and individual free will as essential values of nationalism (even if, in practice, this is far from what is preached). Perhaps for this reason, more than the quality of the food (as might be the case in countries with important culinary histories where traditions are valued, such as Italy or France), the values of freedom—or at least the feeling of freedom of choice—are more important.
In Mexico, we do not have controlled studies on the paradox of choice, but without a doubt, it would be interesting to answer this question to understand how food decisions are made. Perhaps in this transitional stage, hypothetical answers are not so evident, even changing between regional contexts in our nation. What is clear is that for many people, having so many options generates the feeling of “missing out on something better” or simply, confusion. Fortunately, today in certain contexts, no one tells us what to study, whom to marry, or when to have children. But sometimes, the most everyday decisions, such as what to eat, could paradoxically overwhelm and frustrate us in the face of the plurality of options and the consequences of those choices. We live in a society where happiness seems to be an exalted value, more as a mythical perpetual state to be achieved someday than as the treasuring of moments of happiness, which, by the way, are so easily attainable with a good meal in good company.
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.