digress & obsess [v2]

**this is dedicated to my dear friend james, who is now in aussie and as we speak is probably throwing mini pebbles at koalas, tasting fine wine, and checking out the hot surfer dudes @ bondi on my behalf (u better!).

my sincere apologies, cos thinking of you always made me think abt food.

so, dear james, may you always be in the pink of health and be bestowed w such unworldly appetite that befits you stature and copious amts of "charisma"

wouldnt it be well cool , had i the requisite brain and expertise, to write a paper on the economics of all-you-can-eat buffets. you see, ive affliated myself w many ppl that wouldnt give up their food if their life or maybe waistline depended on it.  they give a whole new meaning to the phrase "fat and happy" as tish once blatantly told me.

you see to them, paying homage to haagen dazs, or finishing that pint of ben and jerry’s yields just as much utility as id derive from swipping a credit card over a counter in exchange for a pair of manolos.

which brings me to my very point.

for ppl like them, more is better.  and how better than to treat themselves to an all you can eat buffet?

however, as a friend genuinely concerned abt their wellbeing and satisfaction, i cant help but wonder, are they feeding themselves right?

how does one truly maximize utility?

a few incoherent suggestions:

1. straightforwardly, people would unselectively eat as much as they could in order to maximize the value of their money. equal, plentiful amounts of every dish on offer. increase in quantity eaten translates directly to decrease in cost of each unit eaten.
2. arguably, though, you could eat as much of your favourite dishes in that buffet as you possibly could, in order to maximize your utility even further. so, someone who likes fried chicken far more than fried vegetables would enjoy greater utility by eating more fried chicken than fried vegetables, rather than equal amounts of both.
3. however, marginal returns diminishes. after the fifteenth piece of fried chicken, having a bite of vegetables would probably increase one’s utility more than the sixteenth piece of fried chicken.
4. in addition, one could subscribe to external regulators of value. these are the people who will go into an all-you-can-eat buffet and eat no carb dishes like pasta, rice etc, because these are cheaper, fill you up faster, and are therefore less valuable in terms of ratio of stomach space to dollar spent. ahahahah. chao? familiar?
5. relatedly, there are those who maximize their utility by heaping their plate with lobster, caviar, oysters, pate, peking duck, and all things expensive and rare. rationally this is to do with maximizing unit value of return on each dollar spent. you see, A $5 buffet spent eating pasta is "less valuable" than a $5 buffet spent eating peking duck.
6. conflict arises, however, when one actually prefers pasta to peking duck. which would increase one’s utility more?  uh oh.
7. also, do any one of these methods of increasing utility increase utility more than the others? even if one prefers pasta to peking duck, i.e. eating pasta would increase one’s utility more than eating duck, could one’s utility actually be increased more by eating peking duck simply because one knows that duck is more expensive than pasta?
8. and for all good intentions sake, how the hell does desserts fit into all this??

if anyone economically-inclined ever writes a paper on this, maybe lemme know?

so for all u cynics out there.  economics love it or loathe it can be applied to just abt anything in life.

heck, if researching this paper allows me to peruse all-you-can-eat buffets all over the world,

i’ll write the damned thing myself.

-in kind regards to your email.

see you soon.  buffet?  maybe?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2005 at 5:51 pm and is filed under favourite shit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.