Raising The Salad Bar

I don’t know about you, but I love the all-you-can-eat restaurants.

Maybe its the food or maybe its the value, but there is something special about going to a place where you can eat as much as you want and the only thing that can stop you is your belt buckle.

In college, I had a fraternity brother who worked at a bbq joint where they had all-you-can eat beef ribs on Monday nights for like $15.

Yes, $15 was A LOT of money in college, but considering we didn’t eat the rest of the day, I suppose it all balanced out.

So every Monday night we piled into the 1982 Olds Omega and headed over for a good time and a great meal.

Before the night was over, we had destroyed more ribs than Muhammed Ali.

But little did we know the damage that we were doing to ourselves. 

According to livestrong.com, there are 370 calories and 24 grams of fat in 1/4 rack of sauced up beef ribs. 

Plus 26% of your sodium for the day and 17% of your cholesterol.

So let’s do the math... if we each devoured two full racks of ribs.

That’s a quarter rack, times eight, carry the one...

OH MY GOD!

Good thing I was drinking Diet Coke.

With those days long in the past, now we frequent the all-you-can-eat salad bar.

Usually once a week.

For like $8 for the adults and $5 for the kids, you can fool yourself into believing that you are eating healthy.

You start with the three or four options of mixed salads, always dripping in dressing.

Followed by a mile-long runway of every vegetable from Arugula to Zucchini.

Zucchini!  That is so good for you.

Then on the other side of restaurant there are a half-dozen soup options.

Soup is good food.  That’s what the commercial says, right?

So what if they are loaded with cream and salt.

If there is a vegetable in the title, how bad could it be?

Cream of Mushroom soup!   Yum.

Plus do you know how much riboflavin there is in every mushroom.

Then you’ve got the pasta possibilities.   

Plus the fresh breads and the baked potatoes.

No fries here.

And little Johnny, since you were so good eating those vegetables, you can wash them down with a hot brownie and some NON-FAT frozen yogurt.

Hey honey, let’s take the kids to the salad place.

It’s healthy!

Honestly, when it comes to all-you-can-eat, the type of food really doesn’t matter.

We’ve tried Pizza bars, Indian Food, Japanese, Chinese.

You name it, we’ve done it.

Hey, they even have all-you-can-eat pavilions at some baseball stadiums now where you can pay one price, watch a game and eat as many hot dogs as you want.

One Dodger Dog -- 410 Calories, 22 grams of fat.

Nine innings.

Wow, Kobiyashi might have a new place to work out.

For us, or me, the all-you-can-eat is more about value than it is flavor.

It’s the fact that if you stuff yourself beyond comprehension, just think of how much money you are saving.

When is enough enough?

When is enough enough for anything these days?

Nancy Reagan told us to just say no.

How about oh no!

Mel Gibson certainly didn’t know when to stop.

Or Lindsay Lohan.

Or fill in the blank.

And when it comes to making money, I guess there is no such a thing as making too much.

But there is such a thing as spending too much.

I looked into buying two tickets for the Paul McCartney show when he came to town.

After the service charges, the total was like $420.

And that was so I could sit in the same arena and watch him on the big screen.

I decided to make a car payment instead.

Madonna’s last concert tour made $408 million dollars.

This after previous tours had brought in $75m, $125m and $194m.

That’ll buy a lot of toys.

Speaking of Madonna, Alex Rodriguez just made $39.97 in the ten seconds it took me to write this sentence.

I know that because salary-money.com has a page computing how much A-Rod makes every second, every minute, every hour...

In case you were wondering, he makes $114,583.33 every day.

But overindulging is not limited to the celebrity.

I just read an article that the highest paid CEO in the country made nearly $90 million dollars last year.

That’s a lot of salad bars.

I’m sure he’s great at his job.

And so were the thousands of people his company laid off.

All of a sudden, I’ve lost my appetite.