Lately, walking down the street or scrolling social media, we keep seeing the same posters and the same ads: "Unlimited pizza for only 400 lira!", "Unlimited wraps, eat as much as you can!", "Unlimited desserts! End your sweet craving!"
At first glance these campaigns look like they care about our wallets. They create the feeling "the more I eat, the more I win." In reality they are a huge wound that slowly eats both our health and our social ethics. When we design a robot with young people in the workshop, we calculate carefully how much power to give the motors and how much current the sensors will draw. We know that if you feed 12 volts into a 5-volt circuit, the system burns and collapses. So why are we so harsh with our own bodies, the most precise machines in the universe?
The human body is built on an extraordinary balance in every cell. We take the energy we need, process it, and store the rest. But when we see the word "unlimited," the picture changes.
Even when we are full, we start eating far beyond our capacity just because we paid for it. The huge amount of sugar and carbohydrates eaten in one sitting shoots blood sugar up like a rocket. While the pancreas struggles to respond, cholesterol rises hard in our vessels.
The goal of these businesses is not to give you quality food. It is to fill you fast with the cheapest ingredients (lots of dough, lots of sugar, low-quality oils) and get you off the table. While we think we got full the cheap way, we are already paying today for tomorrow's heart disease, diabetes and obesity.
What these campaigns hit hardest is not our stomach. It is the "reward and loss" center in our brain. When we go to a place for an unlimited menu, our goal is no longer to feed ourselves or enjoy a meal. Our goal becomes getting every bit of value from the money we paid, feeling like we won by making the place lose. Consuming more than you need only because it is free or unlimited feeds greed. Leaving the table so stuffed you can barely breathe, saying "Look what I ate!", is not a success. It is a defeat of willpower.
Perhaps the most painful side is this: in our faith and culture there is respect for blessings. You take only as much as you will eat. You do not spill it. You do not throw it away. With the unlimited logic, half of the pizzas, desserts and wraps piled on the tables cannot be finished. They are bitten and left. Food ordered out of eye greed and left on the table goes straight to the trash. Even if it does not go to the trash, food forced down just so it is not left on the plate is no different from waste. While some people struggle to reach basic food, wasting tons of food every day under the slogan "eat as much as you can" is a huge moral problem that wounds social conscience. In our workshop we teach not to waste even a bit of solder or a piece of cable. We cannot stay silent about a system that normalizes throwing full plates into the trash.
Just like the show-off craze in the digital world, the promise of unlimited food is a trap built to turn us into consumption slaves. You think you ate unlimited for 400 lira. But you pay with clogged vessels, a heavier body, and the burden of a blessing thrown away.
As in every part of life, the golden rule of engineering also applies to nutrition: Optimization and Balance. We should take what we need, avoid waste, and not play with the settings of our bodies. Let us not forget: a quality, healthy and balanced life is too valuable to fit into any unlimited menu.
