Wasting or Not?

My family and I are in Illinois visiting our dear friends, Denise and Steve. We’re at a restaurant known for its Chicago-style pizza. Denise, a high level district retail manager, who is accustomed to fine dining and various cuisines while traveling around the country, recommends a couple of dishes and decides on her meal. The waiter comes to our table and Denise orders three things from the menu. I think it’s a salad, a main course, and something else to share with her husband. But…he orders, too. Her salad arrives and it is big enough to feed three people! All the other food is served and everything is huge! My first thought, “I’ll have delicious leftovers.”

Denise offers to share her beautiful salad and I accept, but I don’t take too much because I’m also devouring the deep dish pizza - and it is “her” salad.

It’s twenty minutes later and the waiter is back asking if he can take anything from the table; and what does Denise do? She waves the salad away! The beautiful, delicious salad, not even half eaten…gone. I can’t react fast enough to tell the waiter, “Bring that back!”

“Denise, you hardly ate any of that. I would have eaten more if I’d known that you weren’t going to eat it all.”

“Oh, I’m sorry Anita. I just ordered it because I just wanted a ‘little taste’ of it.”

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Steve casually says, “Oh, Denise orders and eats like that all the time.”

I’m thinking, “That’s right – they don’t have three college educations to pay for.”

There’s a lot of waste in my household too. My daughter is rushing to get the bus for school and she still pours herself a second bowl of cereal and adds more milk, even though she has one minute before she has to leave. Two spoonfuls eaten and she’s gone.

Why?

Am I the only person that hates throwing away perfectly good food? My kids bring their lunch boxes home from school with sandwiches that they’ve taken two bites out of. Hot, greasy cheese sticks come back. Soggy fruit comes back.

“Oh Mommy, I wasn’t that hungry today.”

Do they think money grows on trees? (Oh, that was the sixties and seventies.)

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And let's not even talk about the leftovers from the fridge.

But back to restaurants – When my husband, the girls and I eat out, I, Miss Frugal, will asks questions such as, “How many chicken tenders does that include? Will a slice of that cake serve two? What’s the size glass for the small serving of juice?”

After many episodes of seeing whole plates of french fries, half eaten sundaes, and syrup drenched pancakes taken away from our table because my girls (who eat like birds) can’t finish their meals or because we can’t take it in a doggy bag, I have learned that sharing an entrée between two kids is the thing to do. I don’t have to hear the voices of my parents saying, “There are kids starving in Africa and India.”

At a restaurant, are you paying for the dining and socializing experience, or the food, or both? Are you okay with food being thrown away as long as you’ve had a pleasant experience?