The Next Dish

Imagine standing at a buffet.

Plates clatter. A low murmer of “ooo’s” and “ahhh’s” at the different stations. Steam fogging the visor glass things hanging over the food like a garden greenhouse. Curry, lasagne, dumplings, paella, each promising a different kind of satisfaction.

You fill your plate, sit down, and start to eat. But as soon as you take a bite, your eyes wander. What about the next dish? Maybe that one’s better. Maybe that one’s the one you were meant to have all along.

When I was but a wee young lad, there was such an unhinged concept that really reflects the pre-2008-financial-crash known as Pizza Hut All You Can Eat. As an almost-teenage boy, coupled with the fact I had a mild Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles obsession, unlimited pizza, sounded a bit like heaven. Except it wasn’t. Each plate of pizza, every slice in fact, was riddled with the anxiety of what to have next. Or whether the pepperoni was going to run out because my friend was already heading back for their ninth plate.

But that’s how desire works. Not as unlimited pizza, not as hunger, but as worry disguised as wanting. Freud thought desire was about loss, he thought that we crave something because we’ve been separated from it, like a child from its mother. But Lacan goes further. He says desire doesn’t revolve around loss at all, but around lack. There was never something whole that got taken from us; there was only ever a gap.

We’re not trying to fill the plate, we’re trying to fill the gap. The next dish isn’t really about taste or even pleasure. It’s about postponing the moment when there are no more dishes left to want. Think of a collector. Someone who collects pieces of art or even stamps. As soon as they acquire the missing piece, the thrill vanishes. Completion isn’t satisfying, it’s suffocating. So they start over, not because they’ve lost something, but because they need the lack itself to keep going.

That’s what Lacan calls the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. Not the thing we want, but the thing that keeps us wanting. The mirage on the horizon. The next dish that keeps us moving down the line.

We think we want the food, the lover, the phone, the promotion, but what we really want is the wanting itself. The anticipation, the pursuit, the electric hum of maybe-this-time. That’s the true addiction. The unopened box is more thrilling than what’s inside. The message notification is more exciting than the conversation that follows. The swipe-right is more exciting than the actual date.

This is the difference between desire and drive. Desire still believes in fulfilment. Drive has given up on it and found its pleasure in the repetition itself. The goal, we tell ourselves, is to find the right dish. The aim, secretly, is to never be full. It’s like realising that you didn’t really want the all you can eat pizza, but the limit of the pizza in the box.

The next dish is not a symptom of greed. It is the structure of our lives. Capitalism, social media, the endless stream of updates and recommendations, all of it keeps the lack alive. We don’t consume to fill the void, we consume to keep it open. To feel that hum of almost-there, that shimmer of possibility just out of reach. The buffet never ends, only the plates get smaller.

So maybe the question isn’t what’s next. Maybe it’s what happens if you stop moving down the line. If you stay with the dish you already have, its texture, its temperature, its imperfection. The lack doesn’t disappear, but it changes shape. It stops being a wound to close and starts becoming a space where meaning can emerge.

Desire doesn’t end. It deepens.

And suddenly, you realise the point was never the buffet. It was learning to taste the plate in front of you.