If you can think of a productivity excuse for telling you this, I’m all ears. But I’m thinking of all those all-day and late-night writing sessions when you know that healthy, decent, good food is absolutely the last thing you need. You want calories and you want them in a handy form that you can wedge in your gob in the most efficient way.

So we’re talking pizza. And I cannot believe I didn’t realise this before, but it is true that the bigger the pizza, the better value it is. By far.

The math of why bigger pizzas are such a good deal is simple: A pizza is a circle, and the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius. So, for example, a 16-inch pizza is actually four times as big as an 8-inch pizza.

And when you look at thousands of pizza prices from around the U.S., you see that you almost always get a much, much better deal when you buy a bigger pizza.

74,746 Reasons You Should Always Get the Bigger Pizza – Planet Money

Planet Money is on the NPR website: America’s National Public Radio. It’s the nearest equivalent the US has to BBC Radio 4 and I’m a fan for its great music programming. But it is American so naturally its statistics are for America. So while you know that the maths is the same here for the size, we don’t have the same level of research into pricing in the UK.

Someone’s going to have to try every pizza in every restaurant in the UK. I’m up for the challenge.