Tuesday 8 March 2011

All you can eat

I took my darling girl to an 'All You Can Eat' restaurant which has just opened in Bath the other night, which is where I took this photo of her on my new phone. She is in the process of freshening her lipstick with molten chocolate, applied with a marshmallow which has been dipped from a chocolate fountain, oozing away close to where we were sitting.

She explained to me that the place is very popular amongst young people like her - which I can understand - but I also noticed that it is popular with distinctly ethic groups of families. Chinese people were sitting there, eating Chinese food, Indians were doing the same with Indian food, etc, but I didn't notice any Mexicans in the place - you have a choice of cuisines from about 5 different countries, including fish and chips for us Brits.

I first came across this sort of restaurant in Florida, when all the workers on the building site would come back from lunch having been to an 'All you can eat for $5' joint, and were unable to move any faster than a sloth for the rest of the afternoon. Do you remember the scene where Paul Newman eats about 200 boiled eggs in a competition? Well they all looked exactly like that.

I've never been able to eat any more than an ordinary sized meal at any one sitting, so the true value of these places is wasted on me. I have heard of people (friends of her above, in the same restaurant!) who have stuffed themselves, only to go outside and throw it all up on the pavement, so have taken on no nutrition at all during the course of the night.

I had a French friend once, whose brother was a member of a select Gastronomique society, and they would meet once a year to spend about £500 each in an expensive restaurant in Paris (in 1972...). They would have one course, then go to the bathroom, stick their fingers down their throat, swill their mouths with bicarbonate of soda, then go back in for the next course. Of course, it was the taste they were after, but I still think that this sort of activity is verging on obscene when there are starving people in the world. Maybe I'm just a Puritan at heart. I still feel guilty about saying "I'm starving" when what I mean is that I am a little hungry, so I try to avoid it.

If I want to make myself feel pity for an extremely obese person (rather than simple disgust), then I imagine them being locked up and forcibly denied food. That image almost reduces me to tears.

The images that actually do reduce me to tears are ones of children crying through hunger, of the sort that Bob Geldoff put on our screens all those years ago one Christmas. Nobody should have to feel guilt about feeding themselves, and the sooner they make it an international crime to speculate on basic foodstuffs as a commodity, the better, in my opinion.

13 comments:

  1. And there are millions of European acres that lie idle!

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  2. Yes, Cro. It has always been the custom to store grain for strategic purposes or to guard against famine, etc., but these days it is simply to wring as much money out of other people's desperate situations as possible, and that's where the true crime is committed. They would ACTUALLY rather see children die of starvation than lose a few dollars/pounds. How can this be legal, let alone moral?

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  3. It is very wrong that some people are eating themselves to death whilst others are wasting away. I know someone who is morbidly obese and although it is self-inflicted, I can't help but feel sad for them too. Famine is a tragedy which can only be blamed on corrupt and inept government.

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  4. Corrupt and inept governments, corrupt and inept charities - but corrupt and extremely efficient commodity brokers.

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  5. The US definitely treats corn as a commodity...first they subsidise the farmers to grow it to feed the demand for corn sryup for Coca Coca and the likes, then they force it to cows on feedlots for cheap meat....and they stockpile it to control the prices....of course there are many hungry American (and Canadian) children too...Food has become a very complicated issue.

    I am like you, can only eat one serving, so the buffet is not a big plus for me, although I have certainly got my moneys worth dining my son at one.

    Your dinner companion is a beautiful girl..those chocolate fountains are all the rage here...every baby shower and wedding seems to have one.

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  6. She certainly is, Raz. You could fall into her eyes - I know, I have! She is so sweet too.

    What's a 'baby shower' ?!

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  7. I dont think I have ever gone into an "all you can eat " place.... my snobbish nature would not let me I guess, even though the food sounds perfectly lovely......
    having said this, I have eaten all over the US and have happily let the orders be gigantic (perhaps it is better is someone else loads your plate up eh?)

    nice looking lassie!

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  8. A baby shower is a party where the mom to be is showered with gifts for the new baby and food is served also. Joe and I do not like buffets as the food is usually bad and we do not eat that much. Plus I do not like the thought of all those people handling it...too much bacteria. We do note many construction workers loading up on the chinese all you can eat. We order from the menu.

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  9. Agree with what you say Tom. That there are people unable to find a square meal and that we have so much - and waste so much - is something that troubles me greatly. I must say I try never to over indulge - more because it makes me feel ill than through any philanthropic reason.

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  10. She's beautiful, molten chocolate and all!

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  11. Yes - the chocolate doesn't sweeten her. See the next post...

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  12. Buffet's are an obscene idea but so much fun to take kids to ...
    I find it interesting that these days it is the less affluent in richer societies that tend to be obese - and yet in poorer societies it is the richer folk - wtf?

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  13. Yes, that's a strange correlation, Sarah. I don't quite understand it myself. Maybe it's something to do with education? All that junk food is aimed at oiks anyway - the lot that throw the kebab wrappers into my doorway every night.

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