The Clean Plate

I promised yesterday that I would find an opportunity to say more about that compulsion to clean the plate, and now seems as good a time as any. I find myself engaged in a reactive pattern that has been with me since childhood and which continues to influence my behavior even today.

The pattern originated, as I see it, in my very earliest days. I was born a couple of years before World War II, so my earliest eating memories date from the war years--a time at which it was worse than sinful to waste food. Food was scarce. Supplies were strictly rationed. We were fortunate in a sense: we lived in a big old Victorian rectory (my father was a country priest, Church of England) and had many people living in the house, including billetees from the military and from the hush-hush facility at nearby Bletchley Park. (We discovered only long after the war that this was where they decoded intercepted German messages on the Enigma machine.) My mother, then--an excellent cook and organizer--would collect all the ration books, pool resources, and put them together with the fruit and vegetables we could grow in our big garden to feed us all in grand style.

My sister and I were constantly made aware, though, as children, that others were less fortunate than we were. Food left on the plate would be met with remonstrances and exhortations to remember the starving children in Europe--and there were, of course, literally many starving children in Europe at the time. It was considered ungracious at best to fail to finish whatever we were served. "Clean your plate" was the mantra--along with that other familiar adage, "Waste not, want not."

That's how it was. I can't stand "waste" of any kind today--and I know I have an overly broad definition of the word. It's a cause of continuing anguish in a world where obsolescence is built in to virtually everything you buy, from clothes to computers, from toys to telephones... So much of what we use in our daily lives is made to be discarded.

Which explains, I hope, why I can't bear to leave my plate uncleaned. The answer, of course, is to put less on it in the first place!

Thursday

Tea in the morning, and a good walk around the hill. Breakfast with cereal and cut-up fruit--a half banana, a quarter pear and a slice of persimmon, with coffee. For lunch, a small lox sandwich with cream cheese and a couple of crackers woth a spread of delicious creamy blue cheese (I can't stand that Frenchified spelling, bleu cheese, can you?) that Ellie had found at the market. Not Cambazola, which I like, but something different, something I'd never tried before... And an apple.

Chai tea at 5PM with a quarter of a large chocolate chip cookie that Ellie had bought yesterday at Nordstroms, and which I resisted then.

A friend was over for a simple dinner: leftover vegetable soup with sauteed Polish sausage pieces, green salad, a couple more crackers and cheese. I drank TWO glasses of white wine....