All you can eat - essay

There will be no Morialekafa tomorrow as I am a victim of witchcraft.

Dick the Slimy accidentally shot another hunter while quail hunting in Texas, right in the face and upper torso. He's in the hospital and apparently doing okay. The explanation for this accident is now being offered by the press. You want to know who was guilty? The victim! Ha, ha, ha.

Consider the "All You Can Eat" phenomenon:

It is fairly common in the United States to come across a restaurant that advertises “all you can eat.” Sometimes this is all you can eat spaghetti, sometimes fried fish, sometimes fried chicken, and sometimes other particular dishes. This has to be a purely American custom. Can you even imagine a Frenchman or Italian, or any other European for that matter, who would treat food in such a disrespectful way? Food and eating are just not embedded in American culture as they are in European countries. In France and Italy in particular food is enormously important and eating is a ritual in which you savor everything: taste, seasoning, smell, preparation, appearance, dressings, the proper wine accompaniment, and so on. A meal is something to be truly enjoyed, not just gulped down in huge quantities in an orgy of gross overeating. The object of eating by this latter method is to consume as much as you can possibly hold, sometimes because it is thought of as a such a bargain and other times as a kind of test of one’s capacity. Of course it has to be terrible for you and clearly is a most unhealthy practice. But Americans, at least many of them, think gluttony of this type is just fine, even fun. They look forward to these (often Friday night) feast fests, and quite likely starve themselves in anticipation.
My only personal experience of this disgusting custom was when I was young, stupid and irresponsible, many years ago, and living in a Beach House with three other young men in Manhattan Beach, California. A few blocks from our house was a restaurant called The Little Bavarian Café (at least I think that is what it was called). On Friday nights they fed you all the fried chicken you could eat. The four of us, young and always hungry, could put away unbelievable amounts of this delicacy. Of course we paid no attention to how it was cooked or whether it was good for us or not, only how much of it we could eat, and who could eat the most. We gloated over our gluttony, so to speak. Obviously the restaurant couldn’t make any money doing this. But that wasn’t the idea. The place was always very crowded. There were no reservations. You had to wait, usually quite a long time, in the bar. Obviously that was the plan. They made so much money on drinks they didn’t really care how much we ate. And, of course, the more you drank before your meal, the less you were able to eat. It was a clever scheme and kept them in business for many years. I recall there was a piano player and a hostess who was a real knockout. It was all great fun and I do not recall any ill effects from this questionable diet other than spending Saturdays trying to recover. I don’t suppose this café exists anymore.
A variant of this custom of all you can eat are various eating contests. I’m sure you are aware of these. You know, who can eat the most pancakes in ten minutes, or who can eat the most hot dogs in some finite time, and most recently, a contest to see who could eat the most chicken wings in X amount of time. Sometimes there are pie-eating contests in which the contestants have to eat more pie than anyone else but they cannot use their hands or any silverware. These are really funny if you like watching people with lots of messy pie on their faces. Sometimes the winner of the hot dog eating contest turns out to be a 110 pound Japanese who defeats a 300 pounder. In fact, little guys often out-eat everyone else. Makes you wonder doesn’t it? Another variant of this is the restaurant that advertises 24 ounce or even larger steaks and dares you to eat one (often you can get it free if you succeed – few ever succeed).
But doesn’t it also make you wonder what in the world is wrong with Americans? What is this desire to gobble down enormous masses of tasteless food as fast as possible? Do you think they worry about how the stuff was cooked? Or even how it tastes? Can you imagine someone sending back a 24 ounce steak because it wasn’t cooked to perfection? Or refuses to eat the hot dogs? Could this be a result of childhood starvation? Seems unlikely to me. Is it merely to emphasize the obvious fecundity of America? To prove to the world that we are, indeed, a land of plenty? I don’t think so. But it is clearly related to the fast food craze in our culture. It seems obvious that if you are a devotee of fast foods you don’t really care much about taste, quality, health, or appearance (consider the obesity epidemic). It all seems to be related in some way that I cannot understand.
As KFC, McDonald’s, and other American chains are moving into Europe and apparently finding at least some acceptance, perhaps we can hope that “All You Can Eat,” contests won’t be far behind. Maybe we could insist on this at the point of a gun? American culture uber alles!