Carol Currie, an excellent newspaper columnist, tells a story of food and greed. She writes:
"We were returning from Georgia on a recent Sunday night and not many restaurants were open. We stopped in a chain pizza buffet restaurant in a small South Carolina town because it was quick and because there wasn’t much other choice.
The place was packed with people who all seemed to know each other. What we witnessed was a full-scale hog-out of the worst kind by
some already well-fed folks.
The decibel level was deafening. The little child laughing hysterically just across from us soon had a tantrum and the screaming sent the noise level off the charts.
There was a line to get to the pizza and I had the feeling I might have gotten my hand cut off if I had reached for the last piece. The restaurant workers were doing an admirable job keeping up with pizza demand but it was difficult when one person loaded half of a hot pizza on his plate.
Some diners started eating their pizza before they even finished going through the line. I saw one woman return to the bar at least four times.
There were bowls for the salad bar but some folks grabbed dinner plates for salad and piled them high. One man had at least a half-cup of sunflower seeds overflowing his plate and spilling onto the floor.
If you have ever been to a pizza hog-out, you know that there is also dessert pizza. There got to be a line at the dessert section, which was puzzling because there were already two kinds of dessert pizza on the bar. It turns out the crowd was waiting for a favorite, a pizza with tiny chocolate chips on top. Once one of these pizzas made it to the bar, it was scarfed up before those at the end of the line even caught sight of it.
“This could be what hell is like,” I commented to Walt.
“Yep, we’d better get out of here before a fistfight breaks out,” he said.
We went out into the hot summer air and it felt like heaven.
I might say that in looking for a category for this post, I thought of "sin" but noticed I didn't yet have such a category listed. I do now.