Buffets Bring Out the Best and Worst in Us All

The world is going to shit. In the 1930s there were only two billion people on the planet and now, with over seven billion of us bumping elbows and butting heads, it's no wonder that news briefings have become glorified tragedy-tickers.

We care about our international cohorts because we're greedy and fussy in equal measure. While wanting to consume all the information in the world, to take a big bite from it, we're also looking for stuff to spit out. We seek out the ogreish, the disgusting, the distasteful, the exploitative, just so we can say we don't like it, we don't approve or we're shocked and saddened by recent events.

Another huge reason we're so endeared to other countries is buffets. Not only are they a way to learn about a country's culture through its metal-tinned cuisine and selected condiments—buffets are the best place for the greedy and the fussy to merge.

In 2012, it was reported—for the first time ever—that more people in the world had died of over-eating than starvation. We're a greedy world. Creaking on top of this, like a foldaway table in a town hall children's party struggles under all that pineapple and cheese, is our cult of the individual. You can personalise every single part of your existence these days, from your Nike IDs, your Netflix account, the cover on your phone, your gas bill, your bedsheets, your Build-A-Bear teddy to your social media branding.

Maybe that's why buffet dining is burgeoning. The epic ZaZa Bazaar, with its combined 1,700 covers across Bristol and Newcastle, is entering into its third year, and the plans to open 80 Red Hot World Buffets (one of which boasts a 20,000 square foot Nottingham outlet) are ongoing. To label these places as merely restaurants would be an injustice—they are food cities.

Buffets didn't start out this way. The concept of laying different types of food out for people to pick at started with the Swedes. The Smorgasbord became popular mid 17th century, and was soon borrowed by the French and given the friendlier name 'buffet' (the jury's still out on the correct phonetics—boo-fay or buff-ay, as you will) and over the centuries, the concept of going to a table to get your food from different platters has trickled down the classes. Like haute couture going high street, except with baked beans that have developed a skin and oily fried eggs instead of pleather and scratchy lace.

While high end buffets—like the oyster and lobster ice bars in Las Vegas's mythical breakfast halls—remain, they share a fundamental quality with the greasy tins of day-glo sweet and sour sauce drizzled over donut-sweet battered chicken and brillo-pad seaweed on offer at every health inspector-baiting five quid buffet in London's Chinatown.

Buffets aren't so much a cuisine as a medium, a methodology for letting customers dictate the pace and capacity of their own platefuls. The benefits of the buffet's simple, universal structure are as myriad as the selections in your average spread. Eat as much as you like! Eat your way around the world from an eight foot table! Tart your dinner up with 27 different condiments! Be vegetarian for one plateful, then pretend you're gluten intolerant for another! Or, like me, pander to your own fear of mushrooms' propensity to grow best in faecal matter and not touch anything remotely fungal with a bargepole.

At every buffet's core is the happy knowledge that, as a diner, you can eat out without having to needle your requests through a chef insistent that his decision to compliment strawberry with prawns will one day be Michelin-approved. Plus, if you're stuck with someone devoid of manners, intent on slurping their way through thick soups or crunching on rib bones while dribble pools on the table, you can appropriately schedule your visits to the buffet bar to avoid sharing any time in their company. Buffets are magic like that.

Buffets' interpretation of the essentials reflect the way our palates and desires have become more sophisticated. Like a better version of when Pret A Manger obviously took note of the growing number of bread-shirking paleo-ers out there and started selling pre-packaged pots of two hard-boiled eggs and a few wet spinach leaves, DIY Bloody Marys, assemble-your-own muesli and even HP Smokey BBQ sauce are offered as standard at Radisson hotels. My favourite hotel in Berlin (okay, I've been there once) lets you take as much coconut water as you like.

Some variations on themes can be unwelcome, though, and I will never forgive Maoz for removing sweetcorn from its hallowed salad bar. The real variety you get at every buffet, past and present, UHT or soya milk, isn't between the dishes, or even the sorts of buffet. Whether you're hovering at the steaming trays of an All-U-Can-Eat Chinese or a cheeseboard at a wedding, the choices you make at any buffet are moral ones.

Without that enforced distance between diner and food provided by the formal-yet-permissive gateway of waiting staff, buffets leave people to make their own rules. Gluttony is justified by the excuse of getting your money's worth. You can pretend to people that that entire plate of onion rings you're marching back to your table are for others in your party, that is, until you sit down in such haste to eat all of them yourself that only half a buttock is on the chair. Apparently, even at 9 AM in a breakfast buffet in Ibiza, a lone man with chino shorts and a pink polo shirt, can swagger over to two girls enjoying a romantic hungover breakfast and ask, "May stink with you, please?" My girlfriend and I still hope it was a dare.

Buffets bring about all kinds of moral learning. Most importantly, if you're confronted with a spread of un-labelled meat and fish, you immediately—and if you don't, you should—you end up internally questioning its provenance and sustainability. There's also the fact that your grazing time is consistently interrupted by people, by strangers. And we are the worst things in the world.

As you navigate the buffet cart, peering over the sneeze guard for descriptions, trying as best you can to work out the texture of a salami without actually touching it, there'll be a yapping child plopping individual chips onto his plate, a woman encrusting her plasticky lettuce with bacon bits and a man who scrapes up every last salt and pepper prawn until his plate looks like a trifle. At this point, they're not people. They're obstacles. Practicing restraint in their presence gives you as many martyr points as my grandma received after getting diarrhoea from eating an entire bunch of grapes because she'd feel guilty if they went off.

Just like casinos don't have clocks to keep gamblers ignorant of time clanking away, non-buffet restaurants keep human bodily movement to a minimum to keep them ignorant of the increasing space they inhabit. All they need is their hands, mouths and eyes, as lithe waiters bring food in the most functional manner possible and get scolded by management for touching their faces too much.

Buffets are the one place where you're encouraged to amass as much as possible, yet find yourself constantly reminded of the nuisance and burden of overeating. Maybe the only way for us to stem the tide of greediness is to experience all our food so publicly, to notice those in more need of dinner and to heed warnings from those who return too often to the crispy shredded beef.

Perhaps the enduring power of buffet isn't that chefs can create 40 different dishes in one morning and leave them under a heater for the day. It's that we can still be fucked to put up with one another.