RIVER CITY JOURNAL: BUFFET OF RICHES: HAVE YOU TRIED THAT NEW PLACE ACROSS TOWN?

It's not just the eating of far too much food for a reasonable price. It's the floor show at the steam tables too.

If Southeast Missouri were a separate nation, the national dish would be All You Can Eat. There is no question that the preference for satisfying hearty appetites in this part of the world is the one-price-fits-all buffet.

In a way, the stuff-till-you-pop dining that is so common around here is an extension of the old-fashioned potluck dinner. That's where we learned to take a little bit of everything out of respect for all those cooks. In my day, you didn't dare not take a spoonful of Mrs. Willey's dreadful corn-and-banana pepper casserole topped with toasted biscuit crumbs for fear of her wrath, which was no small part of her earthly existence. So you tried everything and learned to smile, even when the cucumbers in sour cream turned out to be lox. Fish! At a potluck dinner!

I figure the modern-day commercialization of the potluck dinner started with the advent of salad bars. They started out innocently, of course: A bowl of lettuce pieces plus your choice of grated carrots and cheddar cheese along with bacon bits or croutons topped with your favorite dressings, mostly creamy.

Then someone figured out you could take leftover pasta, mix it with Miracle Whip and a few spices and -- Voila! -- the super salad bar.

Not to be outdone, some eating establishments tried to stay on top of the competitive heap by setting up elaborate dessert buffets: pies, cakes, puddings and fruit. Then some smart restaurateur put a soft ice cream machine next to the desserts and added chocolate chips, chopped nuts, maraschino cherries and strawberry preserves. Presto! The super dessert bar.

Naturally, it didn't take long to figure out a huge food bar located somewhere between the salads and the desserts could entice diners to choose from six kinds of meat, three casseroles, a dozen vegetables and a trio of gravies ranging from light to dark.

But wait. That's not all.

If you can imitate an old-fashioned Midwestern carry-in dinner with a restaurant buffet, why not add some international flavor? So we wound up with the chomp-till-you-bust versions of Mex-Tex (mostly hot imitation liquid cheese and tortilla chips), Italian (any pasta mixed with tomato sauce and oregano) and Chinese (preferably fried -- after all, this is the heart of America).

You would think the impresarios of binging would have stopped there, but there were plenty of worlds yet to be conquered.

Take breakfast, for example.

When the first all-you-can-eat breakfast emporium opened, applications for admission to medical school (cardiology specialties mostly) tripled overnight.

And America loved it.

Nowadays, there is no escaping all-you-can-eatism regardless of the fare. A Chinese restaurant that offers more than 20 selections on one serving table soon finds itself competing with another restaurant with more than 30 choices.

It's the marketplace at work.

By now, you probably think I'm some sort of health-food fanatic who's embarked on a crusade to save the stomachs of my fellow man.

Sorry.

Show me a billboard advertising a buffet with more than a hundred home-style dishes 50 miles out of the way from anywhere I'm going, and I'll be there at the head of the line plunking down my $6.95 and inquiring if it includes dessert and drink.

Heck. There's plenty of room in this world for clever folks to take this concept to new heights. Like the birthday party with a smorgasbord of cakes. I once had a friend suggest to me -- I think he was more than half-serious -- that church attendance might improve if the brunch offered more than bread and wine. Obviously, he was a few Bible verses short of a Sunday-school attendance pin.

I am fascinated these days with the dining habits of my friends and neighbors. I like to eat at the modern temples of gluttony, but most of all I like to watch what others do when the neon out front says All You Can Eat.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.