I think in elementary school we'd hear about the starving children in China and how their existence meant we should make a 'happy plate.' I certainly remember how we'd all go show off our clean lunch trays to the nuns and get glowing praise about how we had not wasted any food.
Though, of course, my strongest memory of those starving children in China came from the movie "A Christmas Story." Because sometimes strongest memories come from movies. That's a thing now.
Anyhoo, in Tuvalu this past Christmas, one of the things that impressed and delighted me was that in this third world, impoverished, developing nation, I heard so many times people lamenting when food would be wasted, and how they wished they could send it to starving people in Africa.
Tuvalu has plenty food, I was always told. No one ever starves in Tuvalu. You have no money? You go work the pulaka pits. Fish. Gather coconuts and breadfruit. Plenty food. But, they'd say, you see on TV and in movies about those poor children in Africa. Tuvaluans have such heart and such empathy that the idea of it was untenable to them. In a world where some people had so much, couldn't it be possible in some way for Tuvaluans to share their plenty with others who have so little?
In 2010 while I was in Tuvalu, some had spoken of water. "Tuvalu is blessed. We have plenty rain." She compared Tuvalu to desert and drought-stricken places in Africa where people really struggled with water. Not so in Tuvalu. Plenty water. Only problem, no way to store it. She, of course, saw futures with drought in which the previous months of heavy rain were still not a sufficient preparation because Tuvalu doesn't have a reservoir, doesn't have enough catchment tanks. When the drought came in 2011, this was proven true. But I digress.
Refrigerators are new things in Tuvalu, and even still many people do not have them or use them. Electricity is expensive, so some people own them but don't often plug them in. Several people we talked to, while lamenting that they couldn't feed starving people in Africa, would further lament all this wasted food.
Except it wasn't wasted. When Tuvaluans have plenty food, it gets shared with everyone. Everyone. Plates and trays distributed around to family and friends and grieving widowers who no longer have a wife to cook for them. The food isn't stored to be eaten at the one home over the next week. In most cases, that's just not possible. No refrigerator. Nothing to keep the food from going bad. So it is distributed.
And what isn't eaten is put into the pig slop. Michael posited something rather brilliant to me. "Pigs are refrigerators," he said. He had to explain this one to me.
Food that is prepared but cannot be eaten is extra calories. If these calories are thrown away, they are wasted. Lost. But if they are fed to livestock, these calories are preserved in the livestock until a later date. Pigs preserve food, as calories, in their meat. In a place with unreliable access to electronic refrigeration, pigs are reliable storage units.
Seriously, how brilliant is that?
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I have this thing about wasting food. I always get a takeaway containers when we eat out (sometimes I even remember to bring my own tupperware from home). Leftover dinner is tomorrow's lunch. Leftover lunch is tonight's snack. I won't say that food never gets wasted-- there are plenty of times where I don't quite get around to eating all the leftovers. But I'm good with leftovers. I can't stand to have extra food on my plate and not save it until later.
Or,
I can't stand to have just a tiny little bit of food that's not enough to bother saving left on my plate. If it'll make a meal or a snack later, it goes into the fridge. If it won't even make a satisfying snack, it goes into my body now. And then I moan later because my stomach hurts from over-eating.
Yesterday morning while I was drinking a giant cup of coffee, I started getting too buzzed and I thought, "I shouldn't finish this; it will make me feel ill." The thought was immediately overridden by another, stronger thought: "Don't waste it!"
Of course, I don't save coffee. It won't taste good later. I had this brief, internal battle about whether or not it was okay to just pour this last bit out. I thought, "Don't be silly. It's just coffee. Pour it out." But then I felt guilty and took another sip because I didn't want to waste it.
That's the point at which it occurred to me that I was still wasting it. I was just wasting it inside my body. I thought about food I didn't want to finish but pushed myself to eat. Same same. I was throwing it away down my stomach. And true, my body stores the extra calories as fat, so they don't really go away. But also true, in my modern American life, my body does not require a store of fat to preserve me through times of famine. It is not the same as feeding the pig. Well, maybe in one metaphor it is, but in the other metaphor it isn't.
But now I'm reconsidering what it is to waste food. The many ways in which we waste food in our country. Something I'll need to consider for awhile before I draw my full conclusions.
Thoughts?
