Buffets Promise Just One Thing
Posted in Chatter
(Chatter letter from the editor, June 2011)
I read in a (very classy) tabloid how Matthew McConaughey admits when he visits a buffet that he loses all sense of physical restraint and consumes as much food as his gorgeous digestive tract can handle. (I don’t think HE thinks his digestive tract is gorgeous, but let’s be honest, it must be a scientific fact.) On other days he’s regimented, fit, calorie-prohibitive. But watch out owners of Chinese Grande Buffet when you see the Lincoln Lawyer headed your way, aka the Incredible Hulk of Mass Consumption. Instead of turning green, he blacks out before endless egg noodles.
Something we both have in common.
If a buffet does anything, anything at all, it makes a promise, a promise other restaurants do not make. And the promise is simple: You will be full when you leave. If you choose to leave. We guarantee it.
That’s all.
Buffets don’t promise the food will be delicious. If they do, it’s just a veneer to make you feel somehow better for going there. “This buffet has delicious fill-in-the-blanks. It’s worth getting our souls sucked out by Voldemort because the food is just so dang mouth-watering.”
Buffets don’t promise the food will be attractive.
Buffets don’t promise the food will be healthy, unless you’re looking for a healthy dose of MSG.
People don’t come to buffets because buffets are romantic, because people think they might propose to their girlfriend at a buffet. People don’t come to buffets because it’s a leisurely place to enjoy the ambience and think about the latest Christian Living bestseller. People don’t come to buffets because they just really feel like experiencing the self-important adventure of eating authentic international foods.
Buffets don’t promise all that. They promise bulk. They are the Sam’s Club of eateries, where the double-wide shopping cart is your stomach, and the unattractive strangers you encounter are only reflections of yourself in 80s-era beveled mirrors as you pop ever so grotesquely out of your jeans.
Buffets just promise there will be enough. Enough.
I think about the emotional and spiritual buffets I visit. Buffets aren’t just physical. They’re on every street corner, in every corner of my house, in every corner of my mind. I gorge on the beauty of my kids, in the way they smile and in how healthy and precious and significant they make me feel; I devour the compliments I receive on my work, piling on the validation of completing a project that’s worthwhile and appreciated; I relish the things I’m planning in the future, things that don’t even exist yet, but somehow I fill myself up with them, these see-through ghostly delicacies.
But this rather exhausting season of life — mothering a baby and a preschooler — has forced me to ask, “Where am I loading up my tray?” I can no longer afford to consume empty calories for short-term sugar rushes because so much is now at stake and everything is oh-so-much harder than it ever used to be.
When Jesus says he is the bread, broken for you, do you take and eat (Matt. 26:26)? When Jesus says he is the bread of life, do you dig in (John 6:48)? When Jesus breaks apart the five loaves and multiplies them for 5,000 people, do you get in line (Matt. 14:19)? Buffets promise me enough, but they cannot keep this promise because we cannot live on bread alone.
Just ask Matthew McConaughey.
Julie