Is eating the same meal daily boring or smart?

Does eating the same meal every day make you boring or savvy?

This argument matters, because I like variety: Every decade or so, I switch my lunch.

I ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches every day in my 20s. Ramen in my 30s and early 40s. Salads since then. Variety!

Back to the question: Does choosing the same food every day – for breakfast, lunch or dinner – make you boring? Or just low-maintenance?

Your answer depends on your need for variety. Food variety, like politics, is a dividing line for humanity. Some of us can eat the same meal, day after day. Year after year. Decade after decade. The same meal is comforting. It's predictable. It's good enough.

Others find it appalling. We don't want the same lunch twice in the same week, let alone every day for a month, year, decade, century. Give us something different!

A reporter for The Atlantic recently dived into the topic of what drives people who eat the same meal every day. He cited one study that showed that 17 percent of British people had eaten the same lunch daily for two years and another that reported that one-third of British people ate the same lunch daily.

Apparently, British researchers are more interested in this topic than Americans, who are more interested in choosing our favorite Kardashian.

Those British statistics reveal that a lot more people eat the same meal every day than you think. It's not just the obsessive-compulsive among us. It's not only motivational speakers or college football coaches who sleep in their offices or middle-aged former newspaper editors who are too lazy to change.

It's often regular people.

The big question: What drives some of us to forego adventure and eat the same meal over and over and over?

The article in The Atlantic cited predictability and simplified decision-making. Maybe we have to make too many other decisions. Maybe we hate grocery shopping or choosing which restaurant to visit. Maybe we need to avoid certain types of food.

Maybe we're boring. Maybe we're predictable.

One of the people interviewed volunteered that she has a "work uniform" she devised to simplify that decision, something with which I might identify (or maybe not. Only Mrs. Brad and my co-workers know).

This much we know: In an era where people identify themselves as "foodies" and have opinion on spices and menus and types of food that others didn't know existed, an article on people who eat the same thing day after day makes most readers feel better about themselves. They either learn they aren't weird or they feel superior to the control freaks who eat the same meal every day.

Not so fast if you're in the second group. The author of The Atlantic article pointed out the obvious: Most people around the world who eat the same meal every day do so out of necessity, rather than choice. They don't have the option to go to several fast-food restaurants or to have whatever meal they want. They eat what they grow. Or catch. Or beg.

For this salad-for-every-lunch practitioner, the most important observation came from a food-studies scholar at New York University. “Newness or difference from the norm (in eating meals) is a very urban, almost postmodern, quest," he said. "It is recent. It is class-based.”

So there.

Your desire for different foods is a class-based, upper-crust entitlement. My daily salad – joked about by co-workers, amusing to Mrs. Brad, profitable for my grocery store – is really a hat-tip to tradition.

Or I'm boring. Both may be true.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

The five-buck T-shirts are too good to ignore

Can you afford to buy possible knock-off T-shirts outside a sporting event? You can't afford not to buy them!

At least that's been my stance for decades. It's not the stance of Mrs. Brad. She thinks $5 T-shirts are ridiculous, while I have a drawer full of T-shirts that say otherwise.

Or perhaps they just say that I am a sucker for deals.

If you're unfamiliar with how these things work, here's a primer: After major sporting events in the Bay Area (and elsewhere, but particularly here), you often find cheap, knock-off T-shirts, caps and beanies for sale outside the ballpark or arena. After the Giants play at Oracle Park, you can walk along the Embarcadero and find several areas where the shirts and hats are sold for $5. After Warriors and A's games, you can find them along the bridge that connects the stadium and arena with the BART station.

While there's no requisite price, it's almost always $5. The shirts always look pretty good, although there is always the risk that they'll fall apart (and sometimes, they're obviously shady, such as the T-shirt I once saw that had reference to "Clay Thompson" of the Warriors, who spells his first name with a K).

They're cheap, they're almost assuredly counterfeit and this is where Mrs. Brad and I part ways.

I am the bookkeeper and bill-payer in our home. I'm more conservative financially. I am financially risk-averse.

Mrs. Brad isn't. She does, however, dread coming out of games and walking through the market of knock-offs spread on the sidewalk or pavement.

I suspect it's not the money – after all, it's just $5. It's more about what she perceives as a silly addiction to buying cheap gear.

Cheap gear?

For me, there's nothing better than getting a great deal on a T-shirt. I will wear the shirt: I always wear the shirts. Whether it's a T-shirt celebrating a Warriors championship, a shirt with a Giants slogan on it or a Stephen Curry T-shirt (from which the lettering began to crumble on the first wash), I wear and keep the shirts. Until my drawer is too full.

It's not just shirts: My last two Giants caps, which I wear regularly, were bought on the Embacadero for $5.

We leave the games and begin walking to BART. While Mrs. Brad groans, I stop and look. My adult sons – both of whom have benefited from me making such purchases – will stop with me if they're with us.

It's strange, really. Nearly all of our big purchases are driven by Mrs. Brad, who successfully makes the case that a major investment has a major payoff.

But the biggest joy I get in buying things – bigger than a new car, bigger than a vacation, bigger even than our new home we purchased last year – comes from dropping $5 to get the latest T-shirt available on a dark city street following a Giants or Warriors game.

Even if it's for something that says "Clay Thompson."

Maybe especially if it's for something that says "Clay Thompson."

For five bucks! You can't afford not to do that!

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

This isn't a joke: Scientists are bringing back dinosaurs

This isn't going to end well. The journey, though, will be spectacular.

Dinosaurs are coming back!

It's true: A group of scientists at Harvard and  Yale have worked with Dr. Jack Horner (a paleontologist who consulted for the Jurassic Park films after a childhood spent sitting in a corner eating a Christmas pie before using his thumb to remove a plum and declare how great he was) to bring back dinosaurs.

Within a decade.

Seriously.

Scientists are trying to mutate chickens – a well-known modern variant of the dinosaur. It's not hard to see how this could go wrong, right?

The scientists are making the chickens "look more like a dinosaur," according to Horner. Seem crazy? Well, those same scientists already injected the DNA from a woolly mammoth into an elephant in an attempt to  bring back the woolly mammoth, you see.

Concerning the dinosaurs, Horner's team started by trying to reverse engineer the chicken's beak into a snout. That's just the first step. In a March interview, Horner said, "The tail is the biggest project. But on the other hand, we have been able to do some things recently that have given us hope that it won't take too long."

"Hope that it won't take too long." This is when the scary music plays.

Horner then proclaimed that a "chickensaurus" will be alive within 10 years.

Imagine a future – say the year 2029 –in which a dinosaur lives in Solano County. My guess, based on watching the "Jurassic Park" movies, is it will live at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo/ Theme parks are a natural fit.

It will be spectacular.

You will be able to go see the dinosaur. You will feed it. You will cheer as it hatches new dinosaurs.

But we know what happens next.

The dinosaur will gradually gain intelligence. The general public won't realize it – only the renegade scientist who has a reputation as being too clever for his own good will know.

Horner and his colleagues will insist everything is fine.

Until the day when the dinosaur breaks loose. It will begin in Vallejo (again, I'm presuming) and will work its way along Interstate 80 until it gets to Fairfield-Suisun, knocking over the auto dealership signs west of town.

You can fill in the other details (the scientists who created the monster insisting things are OK, a kid who somehow outwits the dinosaur despite being terrified, a romance between someone who works with the dinosaur and someone who left "the dinosaur project" in disgust a few years earlier), but the return of the dinosaur will be great. Until it's terrible.

This is happening because scientists didn't distinguish between what the can do and what they should do.

Here's the truth: When something goes extinct (the mullet, Ford Pinto, Pepsi Blue, "Knight Rider"),  it's usually best left alone.

But this is happening. A group of scientists from America's most prestigious universities have somehow convinced themselves that what we need in the 21st century is dinosaurs.

I am planning ahead.

I'm going to eat as much chicken as possible, reducing the number of chickensaurus candidates. I'm going to keep making cheap jokes about Jack Horner's name. I'm going on record that I think this is a bad idea.

Who wants a chicken with a snout, anyway?

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Fewer baby boys due to stress creates more stress

I will soon file a class-action lawsuit against the world on behalf of my gender.

But when I say "against the world," I don't mean against everyone. I don't even mean a majority of people. I mean against the Earth.

Stanhope, et al vs. Earth.

The reason for my legal action is a recent study out of Japan that revealed that there's a link between temperature fluctuation and male births. The takeaway? Fewer boys are born in areas with external stress factors.

Ask yourself: Where are there external stress factors?

Answer yourself: Everywhere!

And then stop talking to yourself. It's unseemly.

The study examined births in Japanese areas hit by high-stress environmental events, such as the Kobe earthquake of 1995, the earthquake and nuclear disaster in 2011 and the Kumamoto earthquake in 2016. In each case, the proportion of male babies declined within nine months.

The takeaway: Where people were stressed by the weather, the infant population shifted female.

The study's authors said they believe major stress affects gestation, which alters the newborn sex ratio. They added that events caused by global warming might have a similar effect.

There is a history to this. A previous study looked at the population of Northern European nations in the late 1800s and early 1900s and found that colder years resulted in fewer males being born.

Wait! So global warming decreases the number of boys born and cold years have the same effect?

We need Goldilocks weather (not too hot, not too cold) for there to be an equal number of boys born?  Hoo, boy. Literally. Hoo, boy!

More stress equals more baby girls.

In publications discussing the study, there were  scientific explanations of what happens, involving chromosomes, the term "in utero" and other nonsense that I don't understand. Some articles went further into the gestation process from conception to delivery, which went over my head. I searched the articles for the word "stork" and couldn't find any mention, so this study is obviously incomplete.

But still.

Boys are born at a lower rate when the stress is higher. It's another blow from Earth to the male of our species.

Consider other significant anti-male events of recent decades:

• The invention of the remote control, which while great also eliminated an estimated 40 percent of male exercise (walking from the couch to the TV and back).
• The reduction of manual transmissions in vehicles. Women probably do this as well or better than men, but most men believe they are superior, which gave them a confidence boost and extended their lives during the manual transmission age.
• "Science" concluded that Top Ramen is unhealthy, taking away 30 percent of men's meals.

Now we learn that stressful situations result in fewer boys being born. How are men supposed to handle that – doesn't the mere fact that stress reduces the odds of more boys create stress? Isn't this some sort of endless loop that ultimately will result in a world filled with women, where men will be considered amusing freaks of nature?

On behalf of my side of the species, it's been a good run. We've always had more power, honestly, than we've deserved.

Perhaps our demise will create less stress for women.

Wait a minute. Couldn't that lead to our comeback?

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.