The last few times I've been watching tv, I keep seeing a commercial for a chain restaurant: All you can eat fries! With any entree!
I wonder if this is ever a good thing? Buffets are bad enough, but I can still see a place for them. Admittedly it is nice to be able to go up and choose a few things from a wide variety of food. But, when a restaurant offers all you can eat on one item, it's just a case of stuff yourself till the cows come home.
I used to work as a server in a rib restaurant that offered all you can eat ribs one night a week. I hated working that night, but it was good money and my husband was in school at the time, so we needed it. Being run off my feet wasn't the part I hated. It was watching customers eat till they were ready to puke. I specifically remember one women who continued to put more and more food in her mouth. It looked like every bite was a struggle. I think the most I ever served to someone was about 25 beef ribs, but the record in our restaurant was around 50. You have to get your money's worth, right?
The thing is, restaurant portions are already supersized. Then then they bring in the marketing gimmick of "all you can eat". I mean, when you order an entree that comes with fries, you probably already have far more on your plate then you should eat. Do you really need to add more to that?
50 Beef ribs?! Insanity!
ReplyDeleteI don't think "all you can eat" is EVER a good idea, even when it's a salad bar, and especially not when it's fries!
Of course you don't need to add more to that. Is it ever a good thing to eat at restaurants serving 'cheat food', whether they have a deal or not? For starters, how can you call that a local restaurant, other than it's proximity to dense population centers? Secondly, the freebie is agri-businesses way to reel you in to consume more. Maximize throughput they say! Puke I say
ReplyDeleteThe fault lies with the capitalist system—its absurd and irrational logic of unlimited expansion and capital accumulation; its obsessive drive to increase material production in pursuit of profits.
The narrow-minded rationality of the capitalist market, with its short-term calculus of profit and loss, is intrinsically contradictory to the rationality of the living environment, which operates in terms of long, natural cycles. It is not that “bad” ecocidal capitalists stand in the way of “good” green capitalists. It is the system itself, based on pitiless competition, demand for return on investment, and the search for quick profits that is the destroyer of your good judgement.
Part of the problem is the prevailing type of consumption based on “false needs”: display, waste, fetishism of commodities.
How can these real needs be distinguished from their artificial and meretricious counterparts? By the fact that the latter are produced by the system of mental manipulation called “advertising.” Contrary to the claim of free-market ideology, supply is not a response to demand. Capitalist firms usually create the demand for their products by various marketing techniques, advertising tricks, and planned obsolescence. Advertising plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by inventing false “needs” and by stimulating the formation of compulsive consumption habits, totally violating the conditions for maintenance of planetary ecological equilibrium. The criterion by which an authentic need is to be distinguished from an artificial one is whether it can be expected to persist without the benefit of advertising. How long would the consumption of Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola go on, if the persistent advertising campaigns for those products were terminated? Such examples could be indefinitely multiplied.
Both capitalism as a whole and advertising as a key mechanism of its rule involve fetishization of consumption, the reduction of all values to cash, the unlimited accumulation of goods and of capital, and the mercantile culture of the “consumer society.” The sorts of rationality involved in the advertising system and the capitalist system are intimately linked, and both are intrinsically perverse.
Advertising pollutes the mental, just like the urban and rural, landscape; it stuffs the skull like it stuffs the mailbox. It holds sway over press, cinema, television, radio. Nothing escapes its decomposing influence: in our time we see that sports, religion, culture, journalism, literature, and politics are ruled by advertising. All are pervaded by advertising’s attitude, its style, its methods, its mode of argument. Meanwhile, we are always and uninterruptedly harassed by advertising: without stop, without truce, unrelentingly and never taking a vacation, advertising persecutes us, pursues us, attacks us in city and countryside, in the street and at home, from morning to evening, from Monday to Sunday, from January to December, from the cradle to the grave.
Yet this advertising is nothing but a tool, an instrument of capital used to dispose of its output, to unload its shoddy goods, to make its investments pay, to expand its profit margins, and to win “sectors of the market.” Advertising does not exist in a vacuum: it is an essential part, a crucial gear in the capitalist system of production and consumption. Without capitalism advertising would have no reason to exist: it could not persist into a post-capitalist society for even an instant. And, inversely, capitalism without advertising would be like a machine with sand in its gears.
Mike
We don't have a lot of chain restaurants in NYC (outside of Times Square) so it's not a big issue for me until I travel. Next month, when I'm in Colorado, I'll go to Red Robin with my family. And while they offer unlimited fries, there's no way I'll take them up on it. It's just not for me...
ReplyDeleteSo maybe they won't change their marketing strategies (that are no doubt in place for people who have eyes that are bigger than their stomachs,) but it has not nor will it change my dining experience there..I don't care what others do...it's just my responsibility to make good choices for myself. ;)
You're right, it isn't a local restaurant. I've changed the word to chain restaurant. I was having a mommy mind moment and couldn't remember that term. I used "local" as a substitute rather then naming the restaurant and giving them free advertising.
ReplyDeleteI get everything you're saying Mike, but I think sometimes if you want to change the system, you have to start by working within it. It's possible to change a population's mindset a bit at a time, but to overhaul it completely in a moment isn't going to happen.
For truly starving people, it is a good concept. I would love to see famished populations get "all they could eat".
ReplyDeleteNot for the rest of us, though. NO, not a good idea at all.
50 ribs, that is sad, isn't it? No, I agree with you, all-you-can-eat is probably a bad choice for many reasons.
ReplyDeleteAll you can eat is a sad reflection on how we treat food as a drug. That's part of why we have so much trouble with our relationship with food. It is when food becomes recreation, a sport, a anesthetic or an addiction instead of a basic necessity of life that we are in trouble. Eat to live not live to eat. Yes, it can be enjoyable but it shouldn't be a substitute for other things.
ReplyDeleteJanet