I need to remember, not innovate

Lately Wendy and I have been trying to avoid eating sugar.  The trouble with avoiding sugar entirely though is that we both get snacky in the evening and really want something to munch on.  Carrot sticks are fine and all but if we rely on something like that we will eventually end up shoveling chocolate into ourselves at a frantic pace; we need something that doesn't have sugar but is tasty enough to keep us satisfied.  Enter popcorn.

I suspect that commercial popcorn probably has lots of undesirable things in it as convenient foods are wont to do.  As such we bought a big bag of popping corn, added salt and oil and voila, we have a snack that avoids sugar and is delicious.  It takes an awful lot of eating to fill up on popcorn what with it being 95% air but we eventually manage it as the mostly empty pot below illustrates.

The thing that really got me was that the hardest part of managing to not eat sugar but still have treats is remembering the solutions I already had on hand.  I knew about popcorn but it didn't pop into my mind when I initially wanted to have a snack without added sweetener.  It makes me wonder how much the information available in our society today helps us when we need ideas.  We already know so much and so often we just need a reminder rather than a completely new idea.  The internet is remarkable at telling us things that we didn't know before but is it actually good at helping us remember what we already know when we need to know it?

What we really need, I think, is a repository of information that provides simple solutions for everyday problems rather than the endless reams of data (both true and false) that our current sources of information have available.  Whether or not it is possible to improve the quality and utility of data to the extent I dream of is unclear to me; obviously we can put everything online but I don't know that we can organize that information in ways that are optimally useful for us.