I propose a property of potluck leftovers:
The amount of leftovers from a potluck grows quadratically with the number of guests.
Here’s why. People will tend to bring enough food to feed everyone at the potluck. So if there’s ten people coming to a potluck, each person will think, “I need to bring enough food for ten!” But then everyone thinks the same thing, and you end up with enough food for a hundred. You’re over by about ninety. The problem obviously gets worse as the number of people grows.
The ideal situation would be for everyone to bring enough food for one person, and then there will be exactly enough food. This works no matter how many people there are, as long as everyone sticks to bringing just enough food for one person.
But that’s much easier said than done. If I’m bringing cupcakes, for example, I’m going to want to bring enough so that each person gets at least one, right? If I’m bringing drumsticks, and I think a typical person would eat four, do I really only want to bring four drumsticks to a potluck with fifteen people? Probably not. I’ll probably want to bring about sixty.
The problem is that as the number of people grows, so does the variety of dishes, and people are going to want to try every type of food at the potluck. So then people end up bringing enough food for everyone, so that everyone can have a little bit of their food, and thus we end up with an amount of food quadratic in the number of guests.
This is kind of a hard problem to solve. I think one solution is to have a fixed number of people bring food, no matter how many people are coming to the potluck. Let’s say the number is three. Those three people make enough food to feed half the people at the potluck (just to make sure you don’t run out of food), and then there won’t be a massive amount of leftovers, even if there’s a hundred people at the potluck. The problem with this method, though, is that the amount of food that the food bringers are bringing grows with the number of people, and the others don’t need to do anything. But the food bringers are actually doing exactly what everyone at a typical potluck does; that is, they bring more food as the number of people grows. It’s just that the burden is somewhat unfairly placed on those three (or however many) food bringers, as opposed to on everyone. But isn’t that better? To have three people each make enough food for 25 for a party of 50, rather than have 50 people each make enough food for 50, and end up with thousands of people worth of leftovers? Maybe. It’s certainly better for the 47 people who don’t have to bring anything.
But in reality, you usually know the number of people who are coming to a potluck ahead of time. So instead of just picking a fixed number like three, the host can choose a certain percentage, say 20%, of the people coming to the potluck who should bring food. Then the host gives those food bringers specific instructions about how much food to bring. But how to avoid temptation? If you knew that 30 people were coming to a potluck, would you really want to only bring enough salad for six, even if the host insisted? Probably not. What if the host made the invitation system private, so that only he or she knew how many people were coming? And then the host can give the chosen food bringers instructions about how many people to make food for. But then wouldn’t you want to know who’s coming? And what if one of your food bringers asks how many people are coming? The host is in an awkward situation. Plus a private invitation system like that makes it seem like you’re hiding something.
I think the conclusion is that even if people developed more awareness about the amount of leftovers that will remain after a potluck, it’s just inevitable that the amount of leftovers will grow (maybe not quadratically, but still grow) with the number of guests. People bringing food that naturally comes in individual units – cupcakes, bruschetta, stuffed mushrooms, etc. – will naturally bring enough for everyone. It’s just human nature. And so, as long as you invite humans to your potluck, you will inevitably end up with leftovers, and the more humans you have, the more leftovers you will have. If you want to avoid leftovers, I think the only real solution is to have a potluck of one. That is, eat by yourself. Or just invite a bunch of robots. They don’t know how to make food.