All You Can Eat


The lovely Mrs. Borengasser and I have just returned from eating out.

This would be nothing out of the ordinary, except for one small factor – we were at an all-you-can-eat restaurant.

There should be a special place in hell for the first person who came up with the idea of an all-you-can-eat restaurant (perhaps something on the order of spending eternity listening to bagpipes).

AYCE eateries are insidious places – enticing but disastrous – one-price, no-limit establishments.

As an example, imagine you want a light lunch?

What do you think of eating?

A salad, of course.

And where can you get a salad?

A salad bar.

That’s right – an all-you-can-eat salad bar.

The next thing you know, you’ve got a mound of food roughly the size of Mount McKinley, covered with croutons, bacon bits, crumbled egg, shredded cheese, chopped ham, sunflower seeds, and dressing.

Somewhere on your plate – deep, deep down below the surface – is a leaf of lettuce and a tomato wedge.

You could have gotten the same amount of garden vegetables by eating an entire carrot cake … with possibly fewer calories.

Tonight, I do the same thing I always do after I go to an AYCE joint.

I collapse to the floor.

I have become Moby Borengasser, the beached whale.

I am comatose.

It would take two dozen Greenpeace volunteers and a backhoe to even budge me.

All I can do is moan, “Too much plankton. Too much plankton.”

“Are you okay?” asks the lovely Mrs. Borengasser.

“No,” I gasp. “I’m having trouble breathing.”

“Good grief! What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I think my blowhole may be blocked with seaweed.”

She sighs. “Why do you do this to yourself? It’s not healthy.”

“Since when is eating not healthy?”

“You were only eating for the first fifteen minutes. After that, it turned into gorging.”

This last time, it was an AYCE catfish restaurant, featuring fried catfish, fried hush puppies, and French fries.

Can you spot a recurring theme here?

If you said, “fried food,” you’d be right on the money.

The only thing that wasn’t fried was the slaw, made, of course, with oil-laden mayonnaise.

I consumed so much cholesterol that I knew my arteries were clogged to the point where only one corpuscle at a time could squeeze through.

I figured I was past the point of needing cardiac surgery.

I needed Roto-Rooter.

“It’s an economic situation,” I explain to the lovely Mrs. Borengasser. “At an all-you-can-eat restaurant, somebody’s going to lose money – either the restaurant owner or me.

"I have to make sure it’s the restaurant owner. And what happens if you and the kids aren’t very hungry? I have to eat enough to cover all of us.

"Actually, what I’m doing is quite noble. I’m sacrificing my own comfort for the financial good of our family.

"I’m protecting us from being bilked by the evil food barons. Do you see what I mean?”

“I’m beginning to understand,” she says. “And I think I can sum up the situation in two words.”

“Oh? What two words?”

“Oink. Oink.”