08/27/2026
Will Ozempic finish off the American buffet once and for all? In our latest Ingestion column, Thea Applebaum Licht remembers the rise of the “smorgy” and finds an unexpected parallel to its variety, temptation, and excess in the semaglutide era. Link in bio and below.
“Though now the English byword for variety itself, smörgåsbord (“butter board”) still meant something distinctly culinary in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. Sometimes, it referred to the traditional appetizer array of hot and cold Swedish dishes, pickled herring, and aquavit found in New York restaurants and Minnesota community halls. Usually, however, it signified not a specific cuisine but a mode of feasting: a long table laden with towers of dishes, and a line of diners snaking past, returning to fill their plates again and again. The history of the all-you-can-eat buffet is in part the story of how the smorgasbord shed its cultural specificity and became part of the great American experiment in indulgence.
That history has advanced circuitously, however. Every few years, those eager American diners have been warned of the all-you-can-eat experience’s imminent demise. This time, the endless buffet—and with it the restaurant industry at large—is said to be flagging in the face of Ozempic, manufactured by the Danish company Novo Nordisk. Will one Scandinavian export finally lay another to rest? As restaurants draft “Ozempic menus,” seeking the key to the semaglutide palate, the answer appears to be: not yet. In fact, the food industry’s response to new appetite-dampening drugs seems to echo the buffet’s carnivalesque suspension of dining conventions. In buffets and Ozempic menus, sampling menus and share plates, the same hope emerges: to circumvent satiety. But so too do the same anxieties, the same guilts and thrills, the same moralizing tensions between seeking pleasure and wielding self-restraint. . . .”
https://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/71/licht.php
