Originally published in The Clifton Courier, January 17, 2018

The truth isn’t always black and white – especially when you’re talking about eating habits.

Around the beginning of the year, we tend to get reflective of the 12 months that went by. We get year in review news stories, we look back at photos and we asses our achievements and failures. But weirdly, I was given the chance to review my grocery habits this year.

I’m a holder of a supermarket loyalty card, and this particular grocery powerhouse decided to celebrate 2018 by giving me a round-up of my points activity for 2017. Riveting, hey?

But then I noticed an item way down the bottom of the email I almost deleted instinctively without reading.  It was a summary of my most-bought items of 2017.

This was interesting. Because yes, I was obviously extremely curious to know just what I’d been trading my money for. But then, there was reason to feel anxious about this heading.

Because personal data can be telling, more telling than we’d otherwise admit to ourselves. We may say that we don’t care how many of the Kardashian sisters are brewing up another batch of Kardashian goodness in their maternal ovens, our online data may tell a whole other story. Because no matter how many rats you couldn’t give about the famed family, you may still click on a bunch of different links to stories teasing out details about them*. Just like Shakira’s hips, the data doesn’t lie.

* Dammnit Kris, just give us the answer! 

Sometimes those kinds of confronting statistics are best left alone (and by “alone”, I of course mean “for the analysts at social media platforms to package and sell to advertisers to target specific commercial messages to you”).

Was I ready to know this kind of detail about myself?

Did I really want to know how many bags of ridiculously expensive brown rice chips I’d bought in a bid to make myself feel healthier while I binged on guacamole*? Would it be helpful knowing how many loaves of bread I’d inhaled? And what if my most-bought item revealed something dark about me that I wasn’t aware of – like if I’d had a weird sponge-eating habit that I’d hidden from myself*, only to be confronted by the cold, hard commercially-collected data confirming that I’d bought 652 sponges last year? What then?!

* Incidentally, this is my dinner plan for the night. Because if I have to pay for my own dentist visits and remember to take my contraceptive pill regularly, you better believe I’m taking advantage of the I-make-my-own-damn-decisions-about-dinner aspect of adulthood. 

As it turns out, my most bought items were much blander than I’d expected.

In fact, there’s nothing remotely sinister about them. It wasn’t a suspicious amount of matches or box after box of chockie bickies. It was actually kind of boring.

And upon analysing my top four as a whole, I come off as a bit of a wanky health nut.

I purchased a box of frozen spinach 47 times. I’ve also purchased a box of frozen, chopped kale 47 times. Each box is 250 grams apiece, meaning that within the year of 2017, I bought 23.5 kilos of frozen greens. That’s roughly the equivalent of a six-year-old kid.*

* Yes, I looked this up. I also look up collective nouns a lot too. Collective nouns are fabulous, mild fun. The perfect way to amuse yourself over a cup of tea.

I also bought a quantity of sweet potato 46 times. Unfortunately they didn’t provide me the total weight, but given how much I do like to pack away the potato’s orange cousin, I reckon we’d be talking Year 12 DD-level* prop in terms of weight.

* I say Darling Downs because he wasn’t able to progress to state because he’s a little chunkier than the boys from Brissie.

The fourth most-bought item was strawberries. I bought at least 41 punnets, according to the email – even though I suspect that number to be higher given how frequently the supermarkets flogged strawbs in two-for deals*.

* They get me every bloody time. Two-for deals tap into something primal inside me and I just can’t override my natural instinct to bag a bargain. 

My data suggests I’m a healthy eater. You might even look at those figures and assume I’m some kind of fitness freak who follows strict diet plans and lives on smoothies.

But it was interesting to be presented with this insight into my grocery habits on a day when my official step count was 307 – for your information, it’s often recommended that people aim for 10,000. I also finished off a six-layer rainbow cream cake – roughly half of which I’d eaten on my own. And I’d actually sipped on a half-empty bottle of $7-dollar watermelon-flavoured wine to see if it was worth keeping after being open in the fridge for a week (unfortunately, it wasn’t).*

So while the data may not necessarily lie, it seems that – in this case – it doesn’t always tell the entire truth.