All you can eat philosophy.

I went out Friday night to a sushi buffet with my friend Longlong.  The place was packed, and as I subsequently learned, rightly so.  Sushi Palace, as it's called, sits in the middle of a nondescript strip mall a few minutes east of Princeton.  Instead of going up to a bar to take what you want to eat, you ordered what you wanted to eat like ordering dim sum (that is, marking off what you on a paper menu for the waitress).  If you ordered too much and didn't finish most of it, you would pay an additional surcharge.  You can, of course, order as many times as you like, so long as you finished what you ordered.  This, in my opinion, was the best idea yet to minimize food waste, the bane of any good buffet.

The fish in this place was fresh and the rolls were fairly interesting.  Best of all, you could try everything to your heart's (or stomach's) content, something which would cost you a fortune at a more typical Japanese place.

Longlong recommended the spicy seaweed salad, which consisted of your typical seaweed salad tossed with tempura flakes, imitation crab meat, and various spices.  Upon seeing the dish, the man sitting next to us told me that it looked delicious - then proceeded to comment that he "wouldn't waste his time on vegetables" while he was there.

Many people, when they approach a buffet, see it as a sort of challenge:  How much money's worth of food can I eat for the flat price I paid?  Others have told me that when they go to a sushi buffet, they take the fish off of the nigiri sushi, throwing away the rice, in order to eat the "maximum amount of fish."  And why not?  Fish is expensive, rice is cheap, and the system is there for you to exploit.  It becomes almost like a sort of game, trying to see just how much you could take advantage of the restaurant.

I used to think this way as well.  The end result, of course, was me being absolutely stuffed with food, with the satisfaction of getting more than my money's worth rather spoiled by the urge to throw up.  Instead of being pleased with the meal, I wished I hadn't eaten it at all.

The problem, you see, was one of utility - in the economics sense.  Most economists will happily assign a monetary value to utility, embodied by the question, "How much is this worth to you?"  Unfortunately, I made the mistake of confusing that question with "How much does this cost?"  For you see, while the absurd amount of food was worth quite a bit in terms of production costs for the restaurant, the end experience of that meal wasn't worth nearly as much for me since I wanted to puke my guts out afterward.  The utility I got from the buffet meal in no way corresponded to the costs of producing it.  Taking a buffet as a challenge was a lose-lose situation for both me and the restaurant:  The restaurant lost money because of the huge waste, and I didn't maximize my utility because I could have had a better experience.  I couldn't even justify it as gaining utility from the joy of beating the system - after all, are you really beating the system if you're worse off as well?  This behavior, in the economics sense, was simply irrational.

So I shrugged politely at my fellow diner, and happily devoured my seaweed salad, and my sweet potato tempura, and my miso soup.  And my mind was at ease, because I knew it was far easier to optimize my enjoyment of my meal than to optimize the cost of it.