Towards the end of a recent lunch, I found myself ogling a friend’s bowl of chicken pista korma. He was done, but there were still a few tender chunks of chicken left. It required enormous restraint on my part not to ask him, “Are you going to finish that?” And considering we were in a restaurant called The Bombay Club, I was tempted to say, “Think of all the starving children in India!” In short, I had become Sister Jean.
My grade school in New Jersey was run by Dominican nuns. One of them, Sister Jean, taught physical education, coached the boys’ basketball team, and ran the annual spaghetti dinner. But during lunchtime, Sister Jean also patrolled the aisles of the cafeteria, trying to keep order and making sure we finished everything on our trays before letting us out for recess.
This was generally not a problem for me since I enjoyed the cafeteria food. Growing up in a Filipino household, most of my dinners involved rice. So the offerings at school were in their own way exotic. We’re talking about open-faced roast-beef sandwiches with gravy, canned corn and green beans on the side, hoagies, meatball subs, and fish-filet sandwiches (affectionately known as rubber on a raft). Bring it on!
Except there were times when I just wasn’t hungry. Every chew got slower, each morsel taking longer to get down. Meanwhile, looking out through the basement windows, I could see my classmates running around and screaming like maniacs. I wanted to be out there screaming with them, but it wasn’t happening—not with Sister Jean inspecting trays and rattling milk cartons.
It was then that I decided to take drastic measures. I started stuffing leftovers into my jacket and pants pockets. Other students must have done the same. I know this because the cafeteria sometimes served us plastic cups of peanuts. And when you got outside, you’d be stepping on those very same nuts—they were scattered all over the place like shrapnel. Kids were actually throwing them at each other (no one seemed to suffer from peanut allergies). Still, I took things a bit further.
Every now and then, I’d conceal a half-eaten burger and forget about it. If it was a Friday, when I got home, I’d throw my jacket into the hamper. My mother would then find the burger, or pieces of it, after the wash. The worst was when I put potato salad into my coat pocket—my mother woke me the next morning, yelling while holding a machine-washed (and dried) glob of potato salad in her hand.
In any event, I now find myself emulating Sister Jean, demanding my own children finish their food before they’re excused from the dinner table. The only difference is whatever they can’t finish (after much pleading), I take upon myself to eat. I cannot tell you how many half-eaten sandwiches, partly bitten chicken nuggets, and smatterings of rice I’ve had from my kids’ plates over the last few years.
This habit has occasionally extended to include the food of other family members. When my mother-in-law asked me to throw away remnants of her “party potatoes”—a rich and delicious blend of mashed potatoes, cream cheese, and scallions—I found myself standing over a trash bin, pretending to throw it out but secretly eating what was left using the serving spoon. Think of all the starving children in . . . Connecticut?
Maybe it’s because I’m bothered by the sky-high grocery bills. Maybe it’s that mantra our parents repeated over and over: “Waste not, want not.” Or maybe it’s because I read a statistic about restaurants wasting 40 percent of prepared food. Speaking of which, the obsession with food conservation turns out to be a common trait in the restaurant industry.
“It has always been my habit when I arrive at a restaurant kitchen to check the garbage bin to see if anything usable has been discarded,” writes Jacques Pépin in his memoir. He notes that his former pastry chef “took to hiding damaged pastries and breads in the trunk of her car, so she could take them home and dispose of them herself, away from my judgmental eyes.” In Bill Buford’s Heat, Mario Batali berates the author for tossing celery leaves into the garbage, which the chef then retrieved and served that night to customers.
I haven’t gone that far, but I do urge my children to eat all their food, especially at school. They tell me they try their best, and I believe them. But I should probably check their pockets.
