All U Can Eat Spaghetti Night, part 2:

So, I promised in the last post to talk about the culture that drives people to eat a lot. I’m not talking about those challenges they have in the biggest loser. I’m talking about those people we all know who seem to eat way more than the people around them without getting fat. Instead, as they eat they become stronger, faster, more resistant to radiation etc. In the technical literature this is referred to as “voluntary massive eating”. Some people manage this through monumental feats of exercise (Myall), others by storing this energy to sustain them through long periods of hibernation (Mica), and others still wear baggy clothing so that if they do get fat you can’t tell (me). But have you ever wondered whether they still eat the same amounts when you’re not looking? Could it be that the big eaters of the world can perform their culinary deeds because they’ve been starving themselves while no-one is around? If a tree made of butter falls in a forest, and no one else is around, will Myall still eat it?

The first point to note is that if the big eater in question is seriously hungry then nothing will stop them from visiting their wrath upon the edible products within range, but this would be an “involuntary massive eating event”. The case we are interested in is where the eater in question isn’t monumentally hungry – if they’re just a normal level of hungry, or not even hungry at all – will they force themselves to eat big, or will they let sleeping dogs made of chocolate lie?

There are a number of factors that place pressure on people to eat big. The first is the cost of food. The appetisingness of a foodstuff item X is proportional to its price according to the following relationship:

Appetisingness of X α average cost of X under normal conditions / cost of X

If the item you’re considering eating costs more than normal, it is not very appetising. As the price decreases to normal levels, appetisingness is not strongly influenced by price. Once the price drops below what you’d normally expect to pay, appetisingness starts increasing pretty quickly, approaching infinity as the cost gets closer to zero. In the spirit of XKCD I’ve drawn you a graph, but I don’t have paint on this PC, so you’ll have to settle for this:

Yes, people, I do have a maths degree.

This relationship explains why there’s such a strong compulsion to eat free food, and why the words “Reduced to Clear” cause my heart rate to rise by a good 40 beats per minute. It also explains why an unfavourable exchange rate can make everything in Europe tastes like ashes.

The second significant factor in voluntary massive eating is peer pressure. The critical feature that underlies this behaviour is reputation. Most big eaters are known within their communities to be capable of great feats of consumption. And for many, the hunger that leads to involuntary massive eating is uncomfortable and deeply distressing. Thus, most big eaters have a strong interest in maintaining access to large volumes of food, in case genuine hunger should occur. This means that big eaters need to impress the people around them with their feats of eating regularly to maintain their reputation and improve the chances that others will give them leftovers or overestimate the necessary quantities during food preparation and so on. The pressure to maintain their reputation often induces those prone to involuntary massive eating to eat a lot even when they’re not ravenously hungry.

This pressure is magnified when several large eaters eat together. When big eaters dine with regular folk, a system of territorial dominance develops over other people’s left-over food. By eating more than the people around them a diner gains control over the best territories and the right to any leftovers contained therein. It should be noted that this usually operates at a subconscious level. This is the “Is he having more? Maybe I’ll have some more,” effect.

And finally, big eaters provide a collegiate atmosphere in which to chow down. You might feel a bit awkward at All U Can Eat Spaghetti Night if your fellow diners have just had a bowl or two of pasta and you’re eyeing off your 14^th serving. After all, watching other people eat is kind of creepy. However, if there’s a whole pack of you, there’s a collective spirit that encourages all of you to just keep asking for more.

So, to answer the question about the tree made of butter, Myall would eat if he was hungry, or if it was free, but he probably wouldn’t just eat it just for fun. But if Myall and Mica were both there when the tree fell down, they would eat that tree, and probably also another regular tree made of wood, just to make sure that neither one felt like they’d got the upper hand.

All U Can Eat Spaghetti Night, part 1

I know what you're expecting. You're thinking "This is going to be one of those stories about how John tried to eat enough food in one meal to survive for several days, and experienced acute and lasting discomfort as a result of his actions."

Well, you're wrong. I did quite a lot of spaghetti, but there wasn't really a critical mass of big eaters to help me push the envelope, so I didn't eat more than was prudent. In fact, I got home a few hours after the spaghetti meal and ate a snack, so clearly I wasn't too ambitious.

Instead, this post is about two things, the culture of competitive eating and why a tip based service industry is weird. However, since this post is turning out to be very long, I have decided to separate my thoughts about the culture of competitive eating into a different post. Which means, for those among us who like to be irritatingly pedantic, that this post is not actually about the culture of competitive eating.

So, let's consider a tip based service industry. I accept that there are many complaints about service in Australia. Let me say outright that I'm not someone who shares those complaints. Yes, I've been to places where it took a long time to get served. That was a bit annoying, but I accept that sometimes it's busy and the staff don't get around to you as quick as you would like. No doubt you've got some story about the time the staff took ages and your meal was so cold your tongue got frozen to your fork and when you tried to call for help the waiter-folk got angry and spilled tepid water filled with live jellyfish all over you. Guess what. I don't care. This is my story, and I'm tired of pre-empting your interruptions.

So, back to customer service. I don't like to be bugged. If I'm eating a meal and talking to people, I like to do those things. I do not want to be quizzed by the staff about whether I enjoyed the meal. If your restaurant is any good then I probably did, and the staff should probably just assume so unless told otherwise and move on. Besides, what if I didn't enjoy the meal? I'm much too Anglo to actually say so to the staff, so asking would just make me uncomfortable. I've already made a big effort by leaving my home to come to your restaurant. Please don't make it any harder by actually talking to me. I know you're trying to be friendly, but if I wanted friends I'd be nice to people. What I want is a kind of professional, distanced indifference.

Besides, if someone actually didn't like the meal, and was un-Anglo enough that they were willing to tell you so, do you think they'd wait for you to ask them? No, they'd stand up in the middle of your establishment and bellow their disappointment and anger like a wounded wilderbeest that has been hounded into shallow water by a pack of wild dogs, ready to make their final kill. Asking me if I'm having fun just seems like a way of feeling good about your work, and the last thing I want in life is for other people to feel good.

This is made even more awkward in situations like tonight, where you're the only customers in the restaurant. For a start, being the only customers when you enter a place is unsettling. One immediately wonders why no one else has come in. Is the food terrible? Are the staff unkind? Will I wake up in a bath-tub full of ice with an empty feeling in the small of my back?

A tip based service culture only makes this discomfort more intense. Tonight, we were asked by three different staff members whether the spaghetti was good. Two of those staff members appeared from the back of the restaurant just to ask us this question. There was a degree of desperation in their desire to please us. Normally, such enthusiasm would be spread across a busy room and it would just be a bit odd as described above. When it's all focused on one table, however, this becomes creepy. And speaking of creepy, one guy told us that the pasta sauce had been brewing for several days. Clearly, we didn't realise the deep significance of this fact, so he went on to explain that leftover sauce from each week was saved and used as the base for the next week's sauce. This means that the sauce has some kind of Jung-esque proto sauce deep within it that remembers the very first All U Can Eat Spaghetti Friday at Clansey's Restaurant. In any restaurant there will be a range of facts that are best kept to the staff, and at Clansey's this is certainly one of them.

Besides - no one goes to All U Can Eat Spaghetti night expecting gourmet food. They go expecting a monumental quantity of spaghetti. They want to be awed by the sheer magnitude of your pasta. They want, in short, to eat a lot. Telling them that some small part of their pasta sauce is ten years old won’t make them happy, telling them that you have 4 cubic metres of cooked spaghetti out the back that you can bring to their table on a moment’s whim will. They want portions that will make their bowels move in mere anticipation of the bombardment that awaits. They don’t want a meal, they want an epic journey through the writhing landscape of gluttony.

And on that note, Clansey’s restaurant does quite well. It’s not clear exactly how much pasta there is, but they seem happy to produce more on request. Of course, I didn’t push their limits at all, but that is an issue for another post.