On Tuesday, I mentioned our grandson’s appetite, which sparked memories of when his father was a growing boy and able to eat a surprising amount of food. There an incident that has been getting a lot of comment in Chinese social media that again reminded me of growing children and their capacity to eat food, even though the incident doesn’t involve children at all.

In China, as is the case here in the United States, there are “all you can eat” restaurants. One restaurant, however, has banned a food live-streamer because the amount he can eat is costing the restaurant’s owner too much. The man, known as Mr. Kang, told Hunan TV that he was banned from the Handai Seafood BBQ Buffet in Changsha city after a series of binges.

He ate 1.5 kg (3.3#) of port trotters during his first visit and 4 kg (8.8#) of prawns on another visit. It is pretty obvious that this man is capable of eating enormous amounts of food. That kind of binge eating isn’t exactly good for your health, but the restaurant claimed to be a place where you can have “all you can eat.” It isn’t called “all that is good for you to eat,” or “all you should eat,” “or all a normal person can eat.” It is called “all you can eat.” Mr. Kang, apparently can eat more than the restaurant owner can afford. “Every time he come here, I lose a few hundred yuan,” he said. “Even when he drinks soy milk, he can drink 20 or 30 bottles. When he eats the pork trotters, he consumes the whole tray of them. As for prawns, usually people use tongs to pick them up. He uses a tray to take them all.”

The story of the conflict between the binge eater and the restaurant has garnered more than 250 million views on Weibo. Some commenters have said that the restaurant should not be an all-you-can-eat restaurant if they can't afford it. Others felt sorry for the restaurant owner.

There is a back story in the comic strip “Dilbert” by Scott Adams about Dilbert’s father who never appears in the strip, though his mother is a semi-regular character. At one point Dilbert had a girlfriend who asked about his father and learns that he is living at an all-you-can-eat restaurant because he still hasn’t consumed all that he can eat. If you think about it, there is something especially comical about a 24-hour-all-you-can-eat restaurant. I’m not sure such an institution exists, but in the fictional world of a comic strip, it makes a fun concept. If there is no closing time, all-you-can-eat might be interpreted by someone as all-you-can-eat over the span of days or even longer periods of time. One price, move in, and eat for the rest of your life.

A story that is told in my family, that i do not know the whole story and I don’t even know if it is true at all, tells of my great Uncle Ted, when he moved to California, participating in a banana eating contest. The way the story was told to me is that he ended up winning the contest even though there was another contestant who ate more than he because the other contestant got sick and died. I don’t know if this was a cautionary tale to warn children about the dangers of eating too much at one sitting or if this was an actual event. If you think about it, dying from the over consumption of bananas would be a terrible thing. At any rate, we were told that Uncle Ted didn’t like bananas and wouldn’t eat them as a result of the contest.

Who knows? He might have been a candidate for an all-you-can-eat restaurant in his younger years.

I’ve eaten a few meals in buffet restaurants that advertise all-you-can-eat. There is a lot of food, and you could, in theory, consume more value than the price paid for the meal. But I was raised on church pot luck dinners. And we raised our children on those buffets as well. You have to learn to take a reasonable portion and eat with some moderation to avoid over eating in such a circumstance.

As a pastor, I’ve witnessed several incidents when a child discovers that you can go back for additional portions and without drawing too much interest, specializes in a single favorite food. If, for example, you take only chocolate brownies, you can consume quiet a few, before you are discovered, if you only take one at a time. I think that both of our children had incidents at church pot luck dinners where their eyes were bigger than their stomachs and they took larger portions than they needed and the result was food waste. We try hard to avoid food waste at our house and we tried to teach our children to moderate their consumption. Learning about such things is part of growing up. I’m trying to be careful not to draw too much attention to our grandson’s appetite because I want him to learn to pay attention to his own body and eat because he needs food and not because he is getting attention for how much he eats.

As for Mr. Kang and the Handai Seafood BBQ Buffet, I guess they’ll have to work out their own relationship. The restaurant owner says he is banning all live-streamers from the restaurant. In doing so, he is in line with the Chinese government that is cracking down on eating influencers and is considering banning such videos altogether. President Xi Jinping called on people to “fight against food waste.”

I don’t understand why someone would want to make a video of themselves eating so much food in the first place and I don’t understand why someone would want to watch such a video. Perhaps that could be a new story line for Dilbert or another cartoon. Then again, I doubt if such a story line would hold my interest.

I’ll stick to trying to eat a bit less than I can. I’m pretty sure it would be good for my health.