It's High Time Someone Developed A Universal Scale For Popcorn Butteriness

When I'm looking for an evening snack, a pretty frequent option is popcorn. 

Popcorn is the reliable daily driver of the snack world. It's not going to impress anybody, but it will never let you down either.

But one thing that has always driven me nuts about it is… I feel like I'm taking a stab in the dark every time I buy a box because I can never really figure out what butter level I'm looking for.

READ: AS IF MOVIE SNACKS WEREN’T OBSCENELY EXPENSIVE ENOUGH, HERE’S AN $80 POPCORN BUCKET

I'm a mild butter guy. I just need enough for flavor. I don't need it triple-coated in butter like something Honey Boo Boo's family would've had for lunch. In fact, at the movie theater, I rarely add synthetic butter-like flavoring. 

I like my popcorn bone stock.

But is that regular butter? Is that movie theater butter? Double butter?

I have no clue.

So, I was complaining about this for the umpteenth time as my wife and I wandered through the snack aisle at our local grocery store. I noticed that one brand of microwave popcorn, Pop-Secret, had an answer to the problem.

On the corner of the box was a butter meter letting you know how buttery each popcorn was.

"Perfect," I said. "Problem solved. Now, let us never complain about this again."

But then I looked a little closer and realized this system was flawed, to say the least.

…WHAT?!?!

For those keeping score at home, their scale goes like this, from least to most buttery.

• Homestyle Butter
• Butter
• Extra Butter
• Movie Theater Butter
• Double Butter

Outrageous.

Double Butter, being like three-times the level of regular Butter, drives me insane. Especially when Extra Butter — which is just a little more than regular Butter — is also more than double according to the scale.

It's a disaster.

We need a true scale. They have the Scoville Heat Unit scale to measure hot foods, so you know if you're about to eat a paltry jalapeño or a Chernobyl Devil's Sphincter pepper that will burn the skin off your arm.

They have the International Bitterness Unit scale to measure the bitterness of beer, too.

Even the barber has numbers for clipper length!

So, why not popcorn butteriness? We'll call it the "Col." Reigle's International Butteriness Quotient, or CRIBQ (I'm open to workshopping the name). It will start at 0 for popcorn without any butter and end at 10 for a full stick of butter with a piece of Jiffy-Pop stuck to it.

No Double Butter, no Homestyle or Movie Theater, just "Hey, this has a CRIBQ of 4."

That way, when you go to the store, you can just grab a box of four, and that's the end of it. No deciphering each company's butter scale.

Maybe movie theaters and stadiums could post their CRIBQ, so you know whether or not you'll need to add a splash of butter topping.

I've been to theaters with a CRIBQ of 2, and then others were jumping right to a 6, maybe even a 7 right out of the popper.

I mean, I know there are a lot more important issues that need to be solved right now, but how about we table those and bring this popcorn situation to the forefront now that a visionary like myself has worked out the answer?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go pound a bag of CRIBQ 4 popcorn Tom Cruise-style…