All you can eat (by Joe)

We´ve stuffed our faces merrily in South America, where the food is cheap, plentiful and delicious.

This is especially the case in Brazil and Argentina, where much eating is done at lunchtime in ´pay per kilo´ (or part thereof) buffet restaurants.

Standards are excellent and they serve up delicious hot meats (top), pastas, potatoes, the Brazilian black-bean dish, Fejouda, and provide excellent fresh salad bars (right). This gives you a whole load of choice and - unusually for travellers - the ability to control your diet carefully (well, in theory at least).

In the posher buffets restaurants they also slice you the finest cuts of meat and fish, on demand, straight off the grill. And then there´s the pudding trolley ...

Laura says she finds it unsettling, in the ´per kilo´ places, to have her food weighed publicly before consumption. I can understand that, but more disturbing, I´ve found, is the unpleasant side you can see of people as a jostling mob descends on any good-looking fresh dish recently delivered from kitchen to hot-plate.

In one of the cheaper places we ate, it was all a bit like the first day of the Dickens and Jones New Year sales, with a gang of otherwise harmless little old Argentinian ladies raising elbows and knees to clear me from their path to the fresh beef stroganof.

Anyway, as you can see I´ve still managed to get more than my fair share over the past couple of months (left). I sentence myself to six months hard labour at David Lloyd, Kingston when I get back home.

Joe