Starving Children in Africa

From the time I was little, I remember my mother saying this phrase anytime my sisters and I didn’t want to finish our dinners.  Now don’t get me wrong, this was rarely a problem for me.  I liked food.  My sister, on the other hand, could sit there all night and not finish – especially her vegetables.  To this day I don’t think she eats much that’s green.  But I digress.

Finishing one’s plate of food that your mother served was not only expected and encouraged but mandatory.  My grandparents grew up in the depression and did not waste anything.  It was ingrained into us.  Full or not, we had to somehow manage those last few bites.  To this day, it physically pains me to leave even a grain of rice on my plate.  I see someone else leaving a bit of this or a taste of that and want to reach out and help them scrape it all up.  I’m sure that this is the root of some of my food issues.

Now I have chickens.  They love to eat most of the table scraps.  It’s a win-win situation.  I think my stepmother actually fed her chickens coffee grounds as well.  I have not gone so far as to take apart the coffee pods to scrape out the grounds for the chickens (one has to draw the line somewhere), but everything else gets sent out to somehow get magically turned into eggs (even the egg shells).  This somehow makes me feel a bit better about stopping when I’m full as I know that the remainder is still being used.

Unfortunately, the same compulsion to not waste food also seeps into other areas of my life.  I struggle to throw away anything that “might be useful someday.”  I am not quite a hoarder (not yet at least), but I have quite the collection of potentially useful craft type items.  I once had a nurse make a mosaic tile picture using a bunch of colorful plastic tops off of vaccine vials (don’t judge), I I thought, “what a fantastic idea, let’s save those too.”  My grandfather made a snowblower out of empty coffee cans.  Maybe it’s genetic.  Currently, I’m collecting glass bottles for a friend who’s building a glass wall – I am not alone in these thoughts.  The same friend’s daughter has taken all of the little metal cans I collected from a test we do in the office.  She said, “I want ALL of those…”  There were a lot of them.  I think she said something about using them to make wings or ammunition containers for her costumes.  I wonder if the starving children in Africa need some?