Recipe for Disaster
What's for Dinner
“Ugh! Why did we do that?” “Why do I feel sick and sleepy after just one meal?”
If you have ever said that or felt those feelings after eating out, I am willing to bet the farm it was after an “All You Can Eat Buffet.” Am I right? Thought so.
Nowhere else in the world do they eat like we do, as Americans. We overdo everything. “Go big or go home” is the adage we live by. That mentality is getting us all into a lot of hot water.
Americans are among the most overweight people in the world. Over forty percent of our population is overweight. In comparison, Europeans are under fifteen percent overweight, with Spain having the lowest percentage at under 9.9 percent. The majority of Africa and Asia fall within the under 9.9% to under 15% obesity range. This is a huge gap.
The issue with over-indulging is not just that we feel sickeningly full afterward, but that the constant overdoing it has severe consequences.
Heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases run rampant when your body is regularly overfilled. Cancer, one of the most frightening words in any language, is also linked to being overweight. So it just isn’t healthy.
I know it sometimes makes sense to go to a buffet. You might have a large group of people, and buffets cover just about any cuisine. Your family might be having a hard time settling on a type of food or a restaurant that will satisfy everyone’s preferences. Once in a blue moon, it’s okay. But Americans tend to gravitate there too often, if the number of buffets available in any given area is an indication.
American buffets are a free-for-all, unlike those in any other country. Most nations that offer buffet dining have guidelines and restrictions. They don’t allow you to keep serving yourself plate after plate if you haven’t eaten what you first piled onto your plate. They are mindful of waste and view the wasting of food as morally wrong. In fact, most countries do not want good food to be thrown away. Many, if not most, eateries offer leftover food they cannot sell the next day to the poor and homeless for health regulatory reasons, in addition to moral reasons. They care for their poor, elderly, and homeless.
That is the conscientious way for most of the world.
In our country, restaurants are not permitted to give leftover meals to people who are hungry or poor. The government clearly has no concern for the homeless and the severely poor. They are more concerned with potential lawsuits. I get it. But the United States throws away 60-90 million pounds of food every day. That is an astounding 23-33 billion pounds of food a year. Most of the discarded food, about 70%, is what is left on customers’ plates, uneaten and often untouched.
Other nations that have buffets actually charge you extra if you load your plate with food you don’t eat. Their buffets don’t work like ours either. In our country, you can keep going up to the food trough as long as you can move. Not so in other places. There, you can choose anything you like, but you will receive one plate of food. The buffet concept there is different from ours. It is more focused on enjoying various cuisines at once for everyone in your party. It is not the experience we have here, stuffing as much onto a plate and going back again and again until you can’t comfortably get up afterward.
My family used to go to buffets. When our son was growing up, it made sense. He was a competitive athlete and could eat a small town’s worth each day. At the buffet, he could eat until he was full. Kids eat a lot anyway, but athletes are a different animal. They are lions among domesticated felines. Financially, it was a cheap way to eat a lot. Cheap is not always better.
Whenever we went to buffets, I’d look around at the other customers. What I saw was disturbing. One after another, I saw overweight and obese people overeating, along with overweight children in the same condition. The parents were modeling the very thing they should be preventing: overindulgence.
Childhood obesity in our nation has skyrocketed. Childhood-onset and adult-onset type 2 diabetes have ballooned to magnanimous proportions, all tied to childhood obesity. From 2002 to 2018, cases of diabetes in kids doubled. Among youth, the prevalence increased by 95%.
Minority groups were the most affected demographic. Buffets are generally inexpensive, and for a larger family, they are cost-effective. However, buffets are no longer very cheap. Prices have risen as inflation has hit them, as it has the rest of us. Waste contributes to the high cost of the meals. Restaurants pay for waste removal, which is often tied to the weight of the contents and the frequency of removal they require.
The pandemic made those numbers even worse. Rates jumped another 62% during COVID. Cases have not decreased, even after the pandemic was over. We are a fat society and culture.
The more I noticed the growing number of obese people at the buffet, the more turned off we got as a family. We did not want to model that behavior or train our child to behave that way. We certainly did not want him to suffer from illness due to overeating and weight gain. So we stopped going.
There is nothing wrong with enjoying a well-proportioned meal and savoring the quality of the food. In fact, it is far more satisfying. You actually remember the meal. I can’t ever say I remember a buffet’s options as exceptional.
I believe we need to be intentional about what we eat and how much. We need to consider what we are teaching our young people. Being obese and having poor eating habits do not benefit them or their longevity. Consider that.
You can still be full and enjoy a normal meal. It is much better to walk away from the table feeling happy with what you ate than to feel like you need to sleep off the lethargy it served you on an endless platter.
More is not better, and bigger is not either. Cheap or cheaper is a sneaky fiend. Empty calories are empty calories, and too many are too many, no matter how you spin it. Do yourselves a favor: if you do go to buffets, eat one plate and take only what you know you will eat. If you want to try something you might not enjoy, take only a taste at first. You can go back and get it if you like it.
Most importantly, don’t go to buffets very often, if at all. Keep it a once-in-a-blue-moon option. Rare is better than constant. And don’t eat until you drop. Your kids are watching everything you do. They do what you do. Do better for their sakes.
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