A refrigerator full of food

Nearly a century has passed since the Great Depression marked the worst economic downturn in US history. Like tens of millions of others, my relatives didn’t have their savings tied up in the stock market, so the market crash of October 1929 didn’t have an immediate effect. But that crash was only the beginning of hard times. By 1933, when my parents were teenagers, more than 5,000 banks had gone out of business and the savings of millions of people were wiped out. Unemployment reached 25%.

All of this happened before I was born, but I grew up with the stories of the depression. Those stories were told by relatives as lessons that I should learn about frugality and not wasting. the culture of saving, reusing, handing down, and not spending money on frivolous items was part of the story of our family and of the families of my friends. I don’t have memories of poverty. My parents were able to provide well for our family. We had enough food and clothing and always had a warm and comfortable home. I had a kind of privileged position in our family. My older siblings were sisters. I was the oldest boy in our family and as such, didn’t have to wear hand me down clothing as much as some of the others. I did, however, often head off to school wearing clothes that had belonged to older cousins and had been carefully washed and passed on to me. I didn’t see that as a hardship.

More than the objective realities of the general economy or my parents’ general economic health following the Second World War, I was shaped by the stories that were told in our family. I grew up hearing about making household items out of scrap materials. I knew the story of how my mother’s parents and sisters were not present at her wedding because of war era gas rationing.

If I left a scrap of food on my plate I could count on a lecture about hard times and times when there wasn’t enough food to satisfy. In our family the crusts of bread loaves were treated as special treats. Scraps of meat were saved for soup stock and cooked in the water from cooking vegetables that had been carefully saved in quart canning jars.

I have never suffered from a lack of food, but I cringe when I see food waste. Our children heard about Uncle Bill’s Clean Plate Club when they were little, but it is a story that they chose not to impose on their children. They are educated about the health risks of obesity. They want to offer their children a bit more balance and a bit less pressure to eat unwanted food.

The combination of the moderation of our children and the significantly different attitude about food of our grandchildren with the stories and memories of their grandparents means that at the end of a visit from our daughter and grandson that has included many shared meals with cousins and a couple of birthday celebrations our refrigerator is full of food. We over prepared for meal after meal, placing leftovers in containers in the refrigerator.

Part of returning our household to our usual mode will be a few days of planning meals of leftovers and discerning which foods can be frozen for later consumption. We’ll be feeling the impact of this visit for a long time. I don’t mean to complain. I am overjoyed at the blessing of all of the family meals we have enjoyed. I like planning food for our grandchildren. I love it when our dining room table has all of the leaves in it and all of the chairs are full. I like passing heaping platters of food. I’m a big consumer of pies and cakes and brownies. I am deeply blessed. But I will take pleasure in decreasing the amount of food that goes into our compost container in the days to come. I’ll try to be creative in planning meals to minimize food waste. I’ll carefully label packages and place them in the freezer.

And as we go through the refrigerator and freezer, I’ll carefully save plastic bags and containers that have stored food, wash them out and organize them for reuse. I’ll take secret pride from decreasing the quantity of waste coming from our house. I’ll eat the crusts of the bread that I have been saving for the past couple of weeks. I’ll make fewer trips to the grocery store and there are quite a few things that I’ve had on my shopping lists in the last couple of weeks that won’t appear on my shopping list until the next family visits.

Americans waste more food than any other country in the world. It has been estimated that 40 percent of the US food supply is wasted. The amount of food wasted each year in our country is the equivalent of 130 billion meals. It is far more than would be required to consistently feed the 35 million people, including 10 million children, who suffer from food insecurity in our country. The Internet is full of articles about the economic and environmental effects of food waste in our country.

I’m willing to participate in a bit higher level of consumption and a higher level of food waste in order to practice extravagant hospitality with our family and other guests. I know, however, that the values of wasting less and being more careful about purchasing and preparing food are important to pass down to our grandchildren. They won’t hear me promoting Uncle Bill’s Clean Plate Club, but they will see me carefully sorting and saving food at the end of a meal. And they will continue to hear the stories of people who died long before they were born. I don’t know which of those stories will become the stories they tell, but I’m confident that some of those stories will have an impact on their lives. And I am hopeful that they will learn enough about the impacts of food waste to become a bit more careful as they grow up.

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