this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Strong "you can't let good food go to waste" in the post-war generation, including in my own family. It's so ingrained even in the next generations that many of us will just "finish their plate" even though there's no necessity there. Some of us are quite well off now, but attitudes around food haven't changed. You have to finish your plate. You can't let good food go to waste. People elsewhere are starving. People worked hard so you could have this food. You don't know when you'll be able to have a nice meal like this again.
Like you, I realized the difference when I met people from different, well off, culturally food-secure backgrounds. They'd just stop eating, and throw the uneaten leftovers in the trash. Doesn't matter how good the food was. Doesn't matter how expensive the food was. Doesn't matter that you could eat the leftovers later.
I had a really hard time landing on some reasonable middle ground (you can save leftovers, but you're allowed to stop eating when you're full, etc.). Made me realize that it's so much more cultural than personal. Also raises questions about what we're going to pass down to the next generations, intentionally or not.
It's also not rocket science to figure out, how much you need to eat and plan your groceries accordingly. I seldom throw away food or let it go to waste and I really dislike, if others do.
Same. I also don't get the people saying it's because they're conditioned to clean their plate. Why are you putting so much on your plate in the first place? I get if you're 7 and your mom's doing it but an adult should be able to manage their portion sizes.
Because a LOT of people, parents included- have disordered eating habits and pass those on to their children.
Yea that's why I said that I could understand if you're a kid. As an adult you have access to all the information you could possibly need to figure this shit out for yourself. It's not complicated. I say that having grown up in a "clean your plate" household with my parents who gave very little thought to the nutritional composition of our meals. As soon as I got out of there I worked out a better meal plan and started collecting recipes. It wasn't hard at all. You don't even have to be perfect just keeping an eye on the amount of calories you're consuming is 90% of it. You can do this even if you're eating fast food all the time.
My point was, I don't think a lot of folk realize just how many people have disordered eating, not just eating disorders that can be diagnosed.
But cultural attitudes are pretty easy to change if you can articulate them like this. I didn't come from money or anything, any my parents were definitely strict about food, but not eating beyond being full seems as natural to me as not holding my breath until I pass out. What you are describing sounds more like ideological stubbornness than some cultural PTSD
The great depression shit again? Still is a factor in this? It cannot happen again, it factually cannot. We are more efficient at growing food than we've ever been.
Definitely could happen again, and will eventually happen again. All civilizations fall eventually. Current food production, transportation, and preservation is almost entirely ran on fossil fuels (fertilizer, pesticides, machinery, refrigeration, etc). Climate change will eventually make a significant proportion of current productive land unproductive. Climate change, topsoil loss, super-bugs, super-weeds, etc are also already causing problems; and many experts think the current way of doing agriculture are unsustainable.
Hmm... if you're saying that food scarcity has been eliminated, I'm not so sure.
There's that article on the front page right now about many millions of snow crabs dying off due to our warming oceans. I know those specific crabs might not be a daily food source for you personally but shit, it's a strong indicator that our oceans are not doing well.
Also water scarcity is a looming problem resulting from climate change. There might be more rainfall in general but if it's in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or in the wrong volume then we can't use it to grow things. For example, if arable land dries out the surface becomes hydrophobic, then if you get a big downpour it can literally wash away a lot of your fertile soil.
Also, fun fact (maybe factoid IDK), cities generally contain enough food for 3 days.