How to Buy Pies

Here’s a conundrum: it’s Friday, you’re in some Western Sydney food court ten minutes before noon, and you’ve got a $20 note in your right pocket from Coworker A and a $10 note in your left pocket from Coworker B; without guidance, you’ve been tasked with buying each of them lunch. You don’t even know their surnames, let alone their gustatory preferences. Your phone is flat. So how do you decide?

I’ll give you a hint. These men are drillers [1], that is to say they will undoubtably enjoy a pie this humid afternoon, if, of course, the chosen flavour is agreeable to them. Drillers (as with most labourers) are weirdly fussy people. They’ll happily consume the ugliest foods, the fattiest foods, the blandest, sloppiest, cheapest mounds of what is almost-food—sauce on white bread, cold canned beans, tuna in springwater stabbed onto fork—but they all personally have one or two random things that they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole or feed mother in laws. I met a guy who would eat raw onion, but if it touched a hot pan—hell no. To some, Halal beef is foul and its non-lawful counterpart delicious. Sashimi? No. Fish and rice? Yes. Peas are a plague that will incite doomsday. With food and drillers, it’s an all-or-nothing game.

You hang back from the bakery counter an awkward distance which puts you on the fulcrum between paying-customer and passer-by. The smell of the pastry is mostly enticing, but has an undertone of charr. Then, a Cantonese lady calls from somewhere, ‘Can I help you?’ But you can’t make eye contact to indicate you’re still considering because she is either too short to peek over the bakery counter, or this bench packed with product is far too large. Behind the glass in this Western Sydney food court bakery is a menagerie of pies. Racks of them. Stacks of racks of them, all pleading to be chosen for your coworkers’ consumption: Chicken & Vegetable, Chicken & Leek, Mushroom & Chicken, Mushroom & Steak, Chicken & Chicken, Steak & Potato, Shepards Pie, Steak & Bacon, Steak & Cheese. They have the all-encompassing ‘Meat Pie,’ and less popular ones too: Vegetarian, Curry, Kangaroo. Checking your phone repeatedly does nothing to recharge its battery. Two pies for two different drillers and you by yourself must decide.

It’s clear you should focus on the popular flavours as they are the most likely to be liked. But once you narrow it down to five or six whose probabilities of being eaten is relatively equal, the real problem presents itself: to purchase two pies of the same flavour, or two with different profiles? This would be easy if you allowed yourself to make intuitive decisions. But the longer you stand there, trying to puzzle out the definitely correct answer, the more complicated the solution becomes.

There’s a logical path, a mathematical one that, for your sake, I wanted to remove from this essay but couldn’t bring myself to, so I stripped it to a skeleton and tucked in the footnotes below [2]. This is the result: in terms of probability, it will always be better to buy two different flavours, no matter how small or large you take likelihood-of-liking (x) to be. 

The disembodied voice from behind the pie shelf calls out again, ‘Can I help you?’ You assign an estimated value of 0.9 to x and run a quick simulation to find a 15% probabilistic increase if you go with the two-flavour option. So, you cock your jaw preparing to order one Chicken & Veg and one Steak & Mushroom, but then pull yourself up because… what if both coworkers despise mushroom? What if both coworkers only want chicken? What if they brawl like toddlers over who gets what and you have to, for them, decide? 

How? You’re egalitarian, so this is like a worst-case scenario. Halving pies is illegal in COVID-times. If this situation were to occur out in nature, without your involvement i.e. two drillers stumble upon a pair of pastries in the middle of a vacant lot, it’d be fine, no problem, no worries for you because then it becomes a problem claim for them, and not this ethical nightmare. But when you’re the one buying the pies, the one handing them over, you are granted authoritarian power, you control people's stomachs and lives. You can’t play favourites. So what do you do?

Two flavours has so much less risk. One flavour won’t hurt your heart. Mathematically you should get two, right? So get two. But ethically, you should get one. So get one. ‘Can I help you?’ The voice comes again. You sweat and scrunch up the notes in your pockets. 

It is perhaps time to reveal this is not a hypothetical scenario. The world is a dark place and dark stuff like this happens. It happens to me. And when it does, I often get caught in this internal maelstrom of over-analysis. I’m struck with indecision for extended periods of time. 

I bet you’d like to know what I chose in the end so that if you ever fall into the same sticky circumstance, you’d have some second-hand experience to refer to. I’d like to say that I went the mathematical route and it all worked out for the best—but it didn’t. I’d like to say I purchased flavours that I personally am fond of so that if one or either went uneaten, my gullet would be ready to swoop in—but I didn’t. I’m still here, in the Greenway Village food court, trapped in a fugue. The pies are cold and the pastry stale. My legs are weak. ‘Can I help you?’ The voice says. ‘Can I help you? Can I help you?’  

‘Yes,’ I respond. ‘I need help.’