I have a £1 coin in my wallet, which weighs just under ten grams. e.g. The coin weighs just under ten grams. My wallet weighs more than that. But not much more. I mean, I haven’t weighed it, but it feels heavier than ten grams, and it makes instinctive sense that an object designed to hold several coins would weigh more than a single coin. It’s physics, isn’t it? Simple physics. But, then again, a shopping bag weighs almost nothing and can carry several coins. And a fine net is mostly holes, which are empty space like the vacuum of space in the universe. And I still don’t know how much my wallet weighs, oh God oh Jesus oh God breathe in breathe out.
But, yes, I’m curious to know the heaviest weight of food I can buy with one pound coin, which is currently worth $1.57. No reason, I’m just curious. Amongst its many other uses, money is essentially a means of converting goods into something smaller and easier to carry, and I like to imagine the coin as a kind of dehydrated bag of shopping. You put a small coin in your pocket, take it to the shop, and by a process of walking around the shop with a basket you can convert that pound coin into some pork chops, or sausages. Admittedly £1 doesn’t buy much nowadays, humour me. We don’t have £5 coins yet. Not yet.
So what’s the heaviest foodstuff I can buy with just a pound coin, or one dollar fifty cents. I’m thinking in terms of weight simply because it’s convenient, although I admit that e.g. pasta is quite compact in its raw form, but bulks up tremendously when you cook it, whereas in contrast potatoes remain much the same size.
My first idea is a bag of rice or something similar. Going by the price list at Tesco.co.uk, £1.07 will buy a 500g bag of rice. But 90p will buy 1.5kg of potatoes (and at the moment a special offer means that £1 will buy 2kg of a different type of potato). Assuming that I’m talking about spending literally one pound or less, rather than e.g. spending five pounds for a huge bag of spuds and going by the pounds-per-kilogram ratio, is there a heavier, more massive foodstuff I can buy than the humble spud? Three cans of the cheapest baked beans come to 81p and weigh 1.26kg, which surprised me as I was expecting them to beat spuds. Twenty years ago there was a brief baked bean war whereby a can of beans cost 3p, which would get you around 4kg(!) of probably watered-down tomato sauce with a few beans. Ah, happy days. I imagine that 2kg of rice would - when cooked - be huger than spuds but I have no way to prove it.
I’m sure there are other metrics (the most calorific food, the most calorific food that you could eat regularly, the physically largest food, the food with the best ratio of size to calories) but weight. This is probably the kind of thing that survivalists ponder as they stock up their shelters, although spuds don’t keep all that long. They can be grown after the apocalypse though. But so can other crops; you’d need to work out which is the most efficient in terms of seed storage, difficulty, crop yield etc. A whole different topic.