To The Last Drop

When you are laughed at for using the "last drop" of food in the fridge to make soup, scooping the batter out of a bowl cleanly and cutting the veggies to the bitter end, you have your reasons. You're not cheap or a skinflint. You simply hate waste. I can't use The Great Depression as an excuse, and that's no laughing matter either, but I can remember food rationing. As  child I recall  butter paper being scraped for every bit left and the sugar meagerly doled out. In my Home Economics class long ago, dear Miss Maxwell, explained her days serving in the military as she got every grain of oats out of the bag or the last slide of batter out of the bowl before demonstrations. But what really makes me always use up the "last drop" of any food item is a news release: films of starving children scouring garbage dumps for any kind of remaining contents in tins and bottles of things that might luckily contain the smallest morsel of something edible. Or of the homeless hanging out behind restaurants and fast food outlets waiting for the nightly additions to the garbage dumpsters. Reading about desperate Arctic explorer teams who ran out of food and carved up their leather belts to make "soup" , chilled me as a young reader and made me very aware of how bad waste is.  People who throw out perfectly useable food, worry me. It isn't that they can't drive off to the nearest market and get more, it's just plain wasteful. Perhaps you've heard some mothers threaten their fussy kids about starving children who would gladly eat the green beans or broccoli and how lucky their brood is to have those  on the plate. She is right, actually, even if a bit wasteful herself by not giving them something equivalent that won't be ignored. I often watch friends cutting up vegetables by peeling potatoes too thickly or chopping off far too much, in my opinion,  ends of celery stalks or carrots or beans when, with a bit of care, inches more could be saved. Also watching with horror, school children tossing their lunch sacks into the  trash cans day after day because they don't like their sandwiches  when others in the class didn't have a decent breakfast that morning and likely won't see a nourishing dinner later, make me ill. Food is precious and lessons in appreciation of its respect might be a lifesaver - for someone - one day.