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Opinion: Bill Walton, The Clean Plate Society

When this lockdown is over, I’m dining out!
20210411 spag walton

My wife and I belong to the Clean Plate Society.

The CPS is one of those almost secret organizations that need more members but it does not have the budget to advertise or promote its goals and objectives. In fact, after reading an article about food waste in Canada, I fear we may be the only members. I admit that a couple of my brothers might be closet members, however, my sister has dietary issues that she uses to avoid membership.

The Society pledge is “Leave no food uneaten”, a simple concept as long as you have the foresight to not overload your plate, especially at buffets. Buffets are food emporiums where you may select what you want to eat, taste-sample, over-indulge, or take as many shrimps as you like. These delightful places to dine may be forever gone now that we are living with Virus shutdowns – one after another. A substitute for these restaurants can be found occasionally at friends’ homes where the host offers the chance for you to serve yourself. ‘Stay at Home’ has also put those enjoyable outings on hold.

The CPS does have an exception to the uneaten food, and that is the keeping of uneaten food as leftovers. This exception also allows members to take boxes of food from a dining establishment if they cannot finish their meal – even when you order a ‘seniors’ portion. The concept of eating leftover food is apparently something that is an anathema to the Centennials generation – and part of the reason for ‘food waste’ in Canada. Indeed, maybe it is a generational thing: if your parents lived through the Great Depression or the Second World War, they may have passed along eating habits that meshed with the ideals of the Clean Plate Society.

If you or even your parents were born and raised after those trying times, you may belong to the cultural generation that has had, in fact, no shortage of food. There is an economic influence on this food thing and the CPS accepts that if you are below the poverty level in Canada you likely are not concerned about leaving food on your plate. When I think of it, this may have been the influence that set the stage (table) for both my wife’s and my habit of eating everything that was on your plate.

My folks managed to stretch the Great Depression all the way to 1950, keeping us just above the ‘poverty line’ if there was such a term then. I don’t think we ever went to bed hungry but maybe wishing there had been a little more for supper that night.  Mother, who came from a large family, knew how to stretch things to feed a working husband, a grandfather or two, and growing children.

Flour was the standby staple. We kept a 50-pound bag of white flour in a steel storage container right in the kitchen. Mother made bread a couple of times a week; cookies, cakes, and pies when time permitted and ingredients were available. We ate a lot of raisins and currents.

One would be amazed how far Mother could stretch a can of salmon by making patties with homemade bread crumbs. Soups were homemade from chicken bones or ham bones. If no meat was available, there were usually vegetables – mostly potatoes – for soup. You could always extend a can of Campbells Cream of Mushroom soup by adding some whole milk – which we bought from a neighbour. I still like cream of mushroom soup.

Lard was another staple and we thanked the Lord even more fervently when oleo margarine became affordable. More thanks when we could colour it and pretend it was butter. An evening treat was putting some lard or margarine in a frying pan and browning puffed wheat until it was crispy. (When economics improved, we had popping corn). Our cereals were limited to corn flakes, rice crispies and puffed wheat – none of the colourful, sugary breakfast foods of today. Oatmeal porridge was the main breakfast unless we had toast and eggs courtesy of our hens.

Lunches for school were sometimes a challenge. We had a meat grinder with which we used to combine chunks of bologna with homemade pickles to make a tasty filling for the homemade bread. A person could trade one of those sandwiches for almost anything at lunchtime. My siblings get into bragging rights about the sandwiches we took to school. I thought I had the best with the story of eating mustard sandwiches – without the bread; however, my brother almost had his wife convinced that we used to take porridge sandwiches to school.

The thing was that we were in the habit of eating everything that was on our plate. Sometimes it was homemade baked beans and toast, but that was pretty darn good. My Dad had a saying that I sometimes use: “I wonder what the poor folks are having tonight.” It was his way of saying that although we were poor, there were others in harder circumstances. I say it when we are having something simple like spaghetti with Davedi meat sauce, sprinkled with grated cheese, for a treat, reminding myself that there are others not so fortunate.

And so here we are in the midst of another lock-down: restaurants having to discard perishable foods; food banks serving more customers; people delivering free meals to the needy; grocers wasting tonnes of food that has passed its best before date in stores, and people ordering lunch and dinner deliveries and I fear throwing out the leftovers.

Perhaps the CPS is an elitist club because we frown upon those who don’t eat the bottoms of their Tim Hortons muffins, or refuse to eat their pizza crusts, or throw out perfectly edible leftovers. The disposable society needs to change – perhaps this pandemic will stir awareness of our sustainability and the dependence on our sources of food.  The thought of how many people and how much energy was needed to put the food on your plate ought to encourage you to become a member of the Clean Plate Society.

Bon appetit.





Bill Walton

About the Author: Bill Walton

Retired from City of North Bay in 2000. Writer, poet, columnist
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