I spent the last week in Las Vegas.
There are certainly other cities in the world that are better known for their food, but I don’t know if any city in the world is more devoted to the act of gorging oneself to sickness. It’s a city of buffets the way Venice is a city of canals.
Now, I guess this is just common sense, but the food at a buffet isn’t very good. And that would be fine if the buffet costs 10 bucks, but these were 30 and 40 dollar buffets. And if it’s not good food, what exactly are you paying for? Well, you’re paying for variety. So you have to end up making up for the fact that the food isn’t very good by eating a lot of it which is kind of ridiculous.
But I certainly fell into that trap. I went to four buffets over the course of the week, and each time I felt excited by all the possibilities, but then just left feeling sick and ashamed. Like a pedophile at a boy scout jamboree.
Some of the people you see at these buffets will really turn you off towards eating. At least it did me. My last day there I went to the seafood buffet at the Rio hotel. It was 40 dollars for all the shrimp cocktail, crab legs, and mini-lobster tails you could eat. One mother-daughter combo was sitting across from me and they were easily in the 300-400 pound range each. They continually went to the buffet and came back with piles of food and proceeded to glumly stuff their faces. Certainly I’m no one to judge someone for being overweight, but these two with their mullet-y perms and elastic-waisted pants were getting on my nerves. I don’t know if it was a situation where I saw some of myself in their unbounded gluttony or if I was just feeling particularly misanthropic that day. I just remember going to take a bite of crab-leg and freezing half-way as the mom returned from the buffet with a plate that was literally stacked a foot high with food. I sat there glowering and muttering under my breath. The joke was on me though as I eventually looked down to see that drawn butter was dripping all over my shirt.
I encourage everyone on a diet to go to Vegas. There is no better place to see the status of your relationship with food is. It’s kind of like going to a nude beach in Brazil to test your relationship with your wife.
I went primarily to visit friends and didn’t do much gambling — essentially just breaking even over the course of the week. I came home to find I had broken even on the scale as well, and after eating out every meal for the past week in Vegas, I will consider that a success.
