Is it worth it to lick the plate?

If something is so good that you want to lick the plate, you should probably just go ahead and lick the plate. Now that we’ve got that out of the way…

The other day, I was eating some cous cous from a lunch receptacle that trapped small amounts of cous cous in little pockets of the lunch receptacle (not a plate). After spending far, far too long chasing around one or two cous couses, I wondered: Why?

I like cous cous a lot. But not enough to eat it if I’m spending more calories chasing the cous cous around the plate than it will provide me as a digested foodstuff.

So what is the caloric value of one cousi cousi?

My cous cous box tells me that one serving of cous cous is 160 calories for 45 grams.

So I weighed 45 grams of cous cous and realized that while I am interested in figuring out the answer to this question, I am not interested in counting 45 grams worth of cous cous.

So let’s try 5 g of cous cous. How many couses are present?

This is 200 cous cous. It is smaller than a dime.

This is 1,000 cous cous. Incidentally, I’d never counted to 1,000 before.

And there are 2,849 cous cous in 5g of cous cous. I’d probably say give a plus or minus of 100 just because … I counted them all and know I started counting fast at the end.

This is how many cous couses are in 5g of cous cous. There are 25,551 cous couses in one 45 gram serving of cous cous, give or take a thousand.

So since 45 g of cous cous is 160 calories, and 45 g of cous cous is 25,551 cous cous, than the caloric value of one grain of cous cous worth 0.00626 calories.

…

Is it worth it?

According to some excellent googling (“How many calories do I burn eating while sitting down?”), one burns 29 calories in an hour of eating. It takes 1.53 seconds to eat one cous cous (source: me turning on a stop watch, eating a cous cous, hitting stop).

So, per second, I’ll burn 0.0081 calories, sitting down eating (29/3600). Since it takes me 1.53s to eat a cous cous, eating a single cous cous burns me .0123 cal and gives me 0.00626 calories.

So don’t eat one cous cous. Make sure you eat at least three.