Going Bananas Over the Free Food

“One more for the road, huh?” queried the man doling out pizza-ettes at Costco Wholesale, arguably the food sampling mecca of the world.

It felt like an accusation. I got over it--on my third round of Pizza Bagel Bites with sausage, even though I never eat sausage. (I also tried roasted turkey leg, beef and potato soup, five flavors of fruit and nut candies, orange juice and caramel candies.)

My son’s observations of my have-fork, will-travel behavior were more cutting. He accused me of insensitivity, greed and larceny when I ate all but two of the Christmas cookies I had heaped on a plate and carried home from a party given by his pediatrician.

Vats of tasty confection had been decked across the hall. I’d trolled for sweets while my son pondered Santa. In a sugar-induced contact high, my brain short-circuited, forgetting (a) that I was on a diet and (b) that the collected delights were for my son! They were free, available and, well, beckoned me by name.

I am by no means alone in this. Check out the crowds at bars offering free hors d’oeuvres. Did you ever see a holiday party banquet tray that wasn’t empty? And how ‘bout that Costco? There are no sampling limits at Costco! Ted Koehn, president of Demo Warehouse Services, the company that operates the sampling stands, says people have lunch there and have brought dates for dinner! All of which is OK by him.

What happens to people when they get around free food, practically free food (all-you-can-eat restaurants) and social situations where food is the center of the gathering? Psychologists say that deciding how much to eat involves a complex web of cognitive, psychological, cultural and social factors. While there is no research on how people behave around free food, anecdotal and other indirect evidence suggests that if it’s free, we’ll eat it.

“People break their usual rules around free food,” says David Schlundt, associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “They eat more than they would normally eat.

“If somebody says, ‘Hey, would you like to try a piece of Death by Chocolate Cake and not pay for it?’ I would probably say, ‘Sure.’ So what if it clogs my arteries and almost kills me? It’s free!”

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In studies attempting to analyze what that elusive and mysterious creature The College Undergraduate consumes, researchers offered an irresistible lure: free lunch.

“What almost inevitably happened was, they ended up studying gorged students,” reports John De Castro, a psychology professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

“They typically eat about 1,200 or 1,400 calories at one of these [sessions]. With my food diary studies, students normally eat 700 calories at lunch.”

Maybe the hungry undergrad isn’t representative of the rest of the population. But maybe he is. Barbara Lossos, who has been a caterer in the Los Angeles area for 17 years, says people of all stripes act like, well, animals around free food.

If the food looks sparse at an office party buffet, Lossos says, people pile their plates out of fear that they won’t be able to reload. If executives have an office party, their minions wait outside the door to descend on the leftovers. Some of the behavior borders on the absurd.

“We put out chocolate chips, whipped cream and cinnamon sticks at our coffee stations,” Lossos says. “People will load up their pockets with the chocolate chips. Once we decorated our trays with black pebbles and people would pop them in their mouths.”

If it isn’t nailed down, they’ll eat it. Underlying this behavior, De Castro says, may be the irresistibility of anything free, even if it tastes lousy. (How else to explain eating the slop on airplanes and sampling the mystery meat on toothpicks at Costco?)

“You could call it the Cracker Jack effect, “ De Castro says. “They put these free little plastic toys inside that are totally useless. People are crazy about free things.”

Certainly not everyone falls under the spell of free food. Schlundt says he and his wife recently attended a reception at an art gallery where there were Christmas cookies. He succumbed. But his wife, the calorie-counting maven, did not.

Most people, though, “can’t say no to a good deal,” says Paul Rozin, a University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology, by way of explaining behavior in all-you-can-eat restaurants, where people will pile their food into architectural masterpieces of balance.

“My observations are that people at a buffet will eat things that they don’t particularly like but that are more expensive . . . shrimp and lobster, for instance.”

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Michael Sherman, vice president of corporate services for Masterpiece Productions, a special events company in Newport Beach, agrees. “You always want to do seafood because Americans think that is the end-all,” he says.

Sherman adds that the combination of anonymity and free food may be the most potent trigger for gluttony.

“We did a party [for salespeople] where the first night everyone was in regular clothes and eating was pretty normal,” he recalls. “The second night was a costume party and we could not fill the buffet trays quickly enough. It was like we didn’t have plates big enough.

“There were people with three roast beef sandwiches on their plates. We had to keep the food stations open from 7:30 p.m. to 11 p.m.”

And the bigger the party, the bigger our guts upon leaving.

“The more people you are eating with, the more calories you will consume,” Schlundt says. “One possibility is that the social interaction prolongs the length of time spent around food, and you just eat more. Another possibility is there is usually a greater variety of food, and it is just really tasty.”

According to De Castro, studies indicate that when someone eats alone, he or she eats about 44% less than when dining with other people. Eating with even one other person increases the quantity, says De Castro, which may explain why marriage--like the camera--tends to put on about 10 pounds. But when a person eats in a large group, he adds, normal caloric intake can increase by as much as 76%.

Finally, letting your personal pig loose is much easier when dining with family and close friends. Eating with co-workers, acquaintances or others with whom you are not as comfortable, De Castro says, you may be inhibited by the fear of appearing “piggy.”

No inhibiting effect appears to be at work at Topper’s Restaurant & Cantina in the Huntley Hotel in Santa Monica. The place is lovingly referred to as “the trough” by some loyal patrons. The object of their affection is, in part, the fabulous free appetizers at happy hour: homemade potato chips, chicken chimichangas, nachos and endless vats of guacamole and salsa.

“People are civilized for the most part,” says Topper’s general manager, John Gress. “A woman yesterday said she eats here 10 days a week. . . . I’ve seen [people] take their napkins and wrap stuff up in them.”

“And then they always take a handful of mints.”