Of course, not all situations can be so easily controlled and sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. But it bothers me in situations where people can easily control the amount they consume/buy. My SIL is really bad about this when we go out to eat with the family and my parents are buying. We'll all get a big steak dinner, and she will too, and then take maybe a bite or two of the steak and eat a little bit of the fries that came with it, and then she leaves the rest. It makes my parents not want to take her out because they know she's gonna order a big meal and then not eat any of it, and to them that's very rude because she's made them feel like they've wasted their money on her. And the thing is, they know that in situations like that they can't not invite her because she's my brother/their son's wife and to not invite her to family functions like that would insult my brother. Those are the kinds of situations where people like that irk me.

I can't remember a time that I finished a steak dinner at a restaurant, ever! Does that mean I'm not allowed to go out to enjoy a steak dinner? I take the rest of it home to eat the next day. I don't think anyone should be judged for not being able to finish a meal. And I like fries and allow myself to orders them on special occasions. But I can't finish them. You can't exactly order half orders of fries or even dictate the portions in most restaurants. I could understand your arguments if they applied to someone taking more food from a buffet but honestly I don't know anyone that blatant to take gobs of food and only eat a bite, that's absurd.

I gotta say I love having a husband, dogs, and a compost pile. Nothing at my house goes to waste. I carry a huge purse, (my next one will have wheels and a strap) I take one of those plastic reusable Glad containers with a lid when I go out to eat. I have a ready out when there is too much. If it doesn't reheat well, it goes to the dogs. If it's a good leftover it goes to my husband....

That's the thing though, it's not so much that she can't finish it, it's that she doesn't take a box home or anything. What you do is perfectly fine, but she leaves it. Or, when my brother lived at home, she would bring it back to my parents' house and leave it in their fridge and conveniently "forget" about it and leave it to rot in their fridge instead of her own. That's where my parents had the problem, and I can see where they're coming from... it's wasteful because she's not eating the food at all, she's just either throwing it away or letting it rot. And that's wrong.

It seems like a unique case, that is entirely too wasteful. Could you possibly speak with her about it? Say something with "I'm really uncomfortable about how much food you seem to waste. Why don't you take this home tomorrow and reheat it for lunch and if not, can I take it home instead?" When I can't finish my fries I always announce it to the table and let others eat them because those aren't good reheated.

Yes, I’m part of the club. I can’t remember the last time I went out to eat and DIDN’T finish my meal. I ALWAYS finish it. I might be stuffed, but I’ll still eat everything. I also see this as wasting food. I could just stop when I’m satisfied and save the rest for lunch/dinner tomorrow. Instead, I eat compulsively. I’ve probably wasted so much food in my life, not by throwing it out, but by eating it.

Ditto. If I buy it and it's about to go bad, I cook it and freeze it. If I have leftovers, I re-purpose them and we have another meal. I'm very conscious of budget as well as nutrition/health, so there is very little waste. If I make a meal, I'll take that meal and divide it into 6 or 8 appropriate servings, then I eat one serving. If I can't finish one serving in a sitting, I just wrap it up to finish it later or I give it away.

For example, I went on vacation a few weeks ago and I had food that would have gone bad while I was away. I made a simple pureed zucchini soup and froze it into 1-cup portions. I had extra cheese so I made a cheese sauce and froze that in cubes. Onions and peppers were chopped and frozen in bags.

I just don't like wasting money and food is money!

For all those that don't waste food, what do you do when you can't finish the ice cream? There is still no good answer for that. I'm not without morals and fund dozens of ways to keep costs down but not being able to finish a side of fries does NOT make one a bad person!

If I can't eat something that I have been served in a restaurant and it's something I can't save for later, then I would simply leave it. You have no control over the portions they serve you. No big deal. It would be pointless to stuff yourself...even my Mom with her starving children lectures wouldn't do that! As an aside, I seem to recall these lectures always related to things I didn't like to eat (green beans for example). My Mom had no time for fussy eaters...so we discussed starving children and how I should be grateful to eat green beans. FWIW, I now like green beans. :)

I suspect the comments about waste flowed from your initial post, where you said you always purposefully left food on your plate in order to appear "ladylike", which struck me as odd. And I took "always" to mean at restaurants and at home (where you have full control over how much and what is served).

The day that I would be unable to finish ice cream is the day that the earth stopped spinning on its axis, he!l froze over and pigs began flying through the air in droves. Which is why I haven't eaten any ice cream in months.

I'm not being a smart alek - I literally cannot imagine not being able to eat it!

AND, FWIW, I don't feel like you are a "bad person" for not finishing something, it's just something I don't and won't do...

Jen

This! No one's judging you for how you do things! Everyone has their own certain flow to things, and they're entitled to do it however they want. I don't think my SIL is a bad person, she just has a really bad habit. I have bad habits too, like smoking and binging when I drink alcohol(e.g. right now, lol). If me and you went out to eat and you left a scoop of ice cream, I would simply think, "She must not have wanted that for x reason" and left it at that. I only judge people when their habits become a consistent problem.

Yes I always leave ableist one bite of food even at home not at restaurants. One bite of sandwich, it's like I can't finish the last bite.

I was raised on a farm. Though we did not believe in waste, nobody was chastised about not eating all on a plate. Being as we were raised helping ourselves to what and how much we wanted, it was fairly easy to select that amount. But if there were food left in the plate, it was a non thing. Nothing went to waste in the end, the dogs got the meat scraps. We had a slop jar into which went every waste food such as potato peelings, apple cores, any left over food and mild, which there was always plenty of being as we had our own milk cow and goats. The hots usually got the slop, but it was also shared with chickens and turkeys. Nothing went to waste.

I raised my children in the city unfortunately but I likewise did not make them eat all of their food. However if they piled on a wasteful amount and did not eat it they heard from me. My dogs also got the table scraps. (for those of you who have bit into that do not feed dogs human feed crap, for your info, read the ingredients of any dog food and you will see all they get is human food, but lower quality)

Anyway, when I go to a resturant I eat what I want of the food and either leave the rest without any guilt whatsoever or in come cases have it boxed for me, usually to give to my dogs, but sometimes for myself.

Eating food just so as not to waste it is.......... putting fat on yourselves. Period. Why eat something you don't want and work like crazy to get it back off???

Just my two cents on the subject. Take what ya want of it and toss the rest

B F R

big fat rooster

My grandpa spent some of his childhood in Ireland very poor. When he came here he was still poor, and raised my mother to finish her plate. She told me that if she spilt mill as a child she was forced to spoon it back into the glass to drink, or drink it off the table. My mother, after what she went through never forced me to finish my good, but I grew up poor too. I have memories of being hungry and having no food. Especially after she left my dad and we were on food stamps the end of the month we often had nothing substantial to eat, just condiments or some canned veggies. I remember the one time we went out to eat. Once. For my 8th grade graduation. I'm sure I ate everything on my plate. DH also grew up the se way. We joke about how he and his siblings used to put water in their cereal bit my poor people choice was to eat it dry. Even though we are financially upper middle class now, we struggled with not wasting food. I try to take very small portions so I font over eat. We save and eat leftovers though we are getting better at throwing food out when no one wants it. I don't make my kids finish their plates and though I silently cringe when they throw something away, I tell myself that they will never experience growing up poor and so they don't need to have anxiety about throwing out food.

This spills over into every area of my life. I save nearly everything, less we need it I don't want to have to buy it again. Imagine my satisfaction when I use a nightlight that's been in a box in the garage for 5 years! Now we don't have to buy a new one! But being poor, its not that you will have to spend the money for a new one, its that you dont have the money for a new one so you fo without. And clothes. I still wear clothes I've had for over 10 years! If they rip, I just sew them. If you haven't grown up poor you can't understand what it does to your anxiety with wasting things. And having money doesn't instantly cure habits that have been your way of survival for do many years. Not finishing food at a restaurant feels like wasting money and money is in my mind still a very scarce life sustaining thing, even though we aren't poor now. It's hard to explain if you haven't lived it, it's just one of those life experiences that you have to live to really understand.

I get what you mean. My family was middle/upper-middle class until my dad lost his job when he was 40. I was 5. It took my dad about 15 years before he found/held onto another well paying job. So we were poor/living paycheck-to-paycheck for most of my life growing up.

I think one of the reasons my younger brother and I became overweight is because how poverty made so much unstable. We moved at least once a year. Sometimes we had food, sometimes we didn't. So when my parents were able to do a complete amount of grocery shopping, my brother and I would binge on the food when it was brought home.

One of my best friends grew up rich. We've known each other for years. It used to cause me practically an anxiety attack when we'd go out to eat and she'd waste food. She gets hungry often but only eats a few bites at a sitting. It blew my mind how much food she was comfortable throwing away. I'm not talking a few bites - she'd eat just a few bites and toss the rest. When I'm too full, I sometimes overeat or pack it up for later or give it away. I hate to just straight up throw it away, so I rarely do. Over time, we learned each other's eating style, so now we always share an item when we eat out.