I don’t often eat out at restaurants.  I prefer to eat at home and cook my meals.  Not only is it cheaper, I know exactly what ingredients were placed into my food.  However, when I do eat out, I have noticed that far more people are wasting their food than in the past.

I have always taken a doggie bag home with me because restaurant portions are far too large.  I can get two, sometimes three, meals out of what the restaurant thinks is one meal.  I see no point in wasting food that is perfectly fine to heat up and eat the next day.  Apparently, neither did anyone else, until recently.  I’m not sure when the shift occurred, but it has, and I see it more each time I visit a restaurant.

The BBC has written a story about how much food Britain’s waste and, though it covers all aspects of food wasted, it claims that, “A third of people are throwing away food that’s cooked and left on the plate.”

I have seen this first hand at many restaurants.  Recently, I visited the chain restaurant, Chili’s, to try their new fish and chips.  I brought half of my dinner home and had it for lunch the next day.  While I was there, I saw a couple at the table next to me leave more than half their food on the table.  When the waitress came and asked if they’d like to take it home with them, the man emphatically replied no, as if it were some sort of evil deed for him to take home leftovers and reheat them.

At another table, a family of five were eating.  They ordered an appetizer and then barely touched it.  The mother ordered fajitas, was given enough food to make five of them, ate one and left the rest.  One son ordered a bowl of macaroni and cheese (which another rant for another time).  He ate about half and left the rest.  The other son ordered macaroni and cheese and broccoli.  He ate the broccoli and three spoonfuls of the macaroni and cheese.  The daughter picked at what the mother had but barely ate.  The father did eat all he had but, when asked again if they’d like to take the leftovers home, they shunned the very idea.

During the Second World War, wasting food was not only a crime punishable by heavy fines, but near treasonous. Indeed, the world’s major religions have always forbidden the wasting or throwing away of food.

If so many people in America consider themselves good Christians, then why do they not feel like they are sinning when they toss perfectly good food away?  In Islam, the wasting of food is covered under Halal and Haram.  Judiasm has a divine commandment to not waste food.

Personally, wasting food was a sin in my family.  We didn’t have much, so we knew the costs of things and how hard everyone worked to put food on the table.  The occasions that we did eat out, we either cleaned our plates or took it home with us.  When I see people wasting food, I often wonder if they return home to light their dollar bills on fire.  I know this is extreme, but why do people think that it’s okay to spend their hard earned money on food that they aren’t going to eat?  Why do restaurants continue to offer such gigantic portions if people just waste it?  Wouldn’t they make more money if they reduced the portion sizes and charged the same amount?  The chocolate and candy makers figured this one out a long time ago.

If people paid more attention to what they were wasting, they could reduce the amount of food purchases, whether at home or the supermarket, thereby creating less waste and more cash in their pockets.  It also reduces the detrimental effects of wasted food on the environment.

We have forgotten the value of food and the fact that there continue to be food shortages around the world, with many children malnourished or starving.  We need to relearn the value of food and stop considering it a throwaway item like so much else in society.