You can tell within ten minutes in somebody's kitchen whether the biscuits are counted. Not from how full the cupboard is — from whether a second one is a decision.
Sometimes the counting is simply accurate. The arithmetic is the arithmetic, and no amount of reframing moves it.
Some of it, though, is a habit that outlived its cause: people who came through one thin year and went on rationing for a decade after it ended.
One of those can't change today. The other might, once you can tell them apart.