IBM’s Plan to Bribe Me Into Eating a Vegetable

Somewhere in a smoke-filled conference room, the international association of mad scientists has already reached a consensus: I am the laziest person alive. Objectively. Irrefutably. I exercise less than a decorative wall hanging, eat myself into a stupor in front of a monitor, and could theoretically spend weeks fused to my couch—if I weren’t mildly afraid of what comes after.

And because my aversion to healthy living is apparently a widespread condition, the wellness industry keeps inventing new ways to trick people into caring about their bodies. IBM’s latest attempt is a patent filing for a system that rewards you for eating well—with actual cash. Not metaphorical points. Real money. They’re calling it, with the dry corporate poetry only a tech giant can produce, "Providing consumers with incentives for healthy eating habits."

The idea is that employers and concerned mothers could deploy this software to nudge people toward longer, fitter lives. It would automatically detect whether you’re putting an apple or a chocolate muffin smothered in processed cheese into your body, assign bonus points accordingly, and let you cash those out at the end of the month. It can apparently even detect cheating—if you’re quietly binning the salad and the cucumber slices rather than actually eating them, the thing knows.

Which raises the obvious question, even for someone as empirically lazy as I am: would it actually work on me? When does this ship? How does it even detect what I’m eating? And—most pressingly—would I honestly give up Schnitzel with fries, or a bubbling dish of baked cheese with sausage and a soft pretzel, if doing so meant a fatter bank balance by month’s end? I genuinely don’t know. The cheese is very good.