I was recently interviewed for the Scottish Health Survey. It's an interview that lasts for an estimated hour. It took two hours in my case - and you may understand why when you've read this post.
For one of the questions I was shown a true to size picture of a tablespoon. Some of my readers will not be familiar with a tablespoon. For all practical purposes a tablespoon looks like this but, of course, this gives you no idea of the size. Measuring mine the bowl of the spoon is 8cm x 5cm. In strict measuring terms it is equal to 15ml.Armed with that information I know that you can all now envisage exactly what a tablespoon of, say, flour or rice looks like. Or perhaps not!
One of the questions in the Survey was "Measured in tablespoons how many spoons of vegetables do you ear per day?"
Eh? I responded that a lot of my vegetables were eaten in the form of home-made vegetable soup. Soup, however, is classed as a drink and does not count. I mentioned that the people who set the question had obviously never seen my soup. As for the rest of the vegetables I eat daily I could not even make a guess at how many tablespoons are involved. What, for example, does a tablespoon of cauliflower or asparagus (of which I eat a lot) look like?
A rather conservative (and, in my view, totally meaningless) guess was made.
That is the one question that has stuck in my mind but there were quite a few other which elicited much discussion.
How many spoons of vegetables do you eat each day?
