A friend once told me a fascinating story about vending machines in Japan. 

Apart from Japanese vending machines supposedly selling such oddities as live lobsters, underwear, potted plants and eggs, there is an even more interesting cultural lesson to be learned from these machines in temperance.

Indeed, there exists a mythic vending machine in Japan that dispenses two sizes of a soft drink—one small and one large—that both cost the same amount.  Interestingly enough, the Japanese are reported to consistently choose the smaller of the drinks, despite the apparent inferiority in value.

This choice could not seem more unusual to our own value system.  Any red-blooded American with a quarter in his or her pocket would pick the larger drink, regardless of thirst or lack thereof.  We always want the better deal.  To point, recall the last time you were at the movies.  Remember how easily the snack-counter operator persuaded you to order a large drink instead of a medium one (but it’s only 25 cents more!)?

The poisonous concept of the “good deal” is a fundamentally American epidemic; having more for the sake of having more, doing everything bigger and better simply because we can. 

It’s why middle-class America gives away bags and bags full of perfectly good clothes to charity every year.  It’s why my mother encourages me to buy two shirts instead of one (but it’s such a good deal!).  It’s why the buttons are collectively popping off of our waistbands.

But the crown jewel of this take-as-much-as-you-can attitude has to be competitive eating contests, in which contestants sit on a stage and attempt to consume the largest quantity of food possible in a given amount of time in an eat-or-be-eaten frenzy.  The horror.  The gluttony.  The soiled napkins!

Last weekend at Relay for Life, when I heard the Buffalo wing eating contest being announced over the loudspeaker, my first instinct was to jump to a very hefty conclusion: surely the eating contest is a strictly American institution.  My mind immediately fled towards the Japanese, those stewards of stoicism, those smaller-soda-choosing masters of temperance.  Surely they would not participate in such gluttony.

After a quick Google search, however, I discovered, to underscore the supreme irony of it all, that Japan was second only to the United States in its love of eating contests.
Sigh.

Maybe temperance has become archaic, just another passing remnant of values that are no longer relevant.  But in living among such excess, I do fear that temperance is the only path to remaining human.

Rebecca Quinn is a junior art history, Spanish and French triple major. She can be reached for comment at [email protected].