Measured dining
Whenever he ate with a group, he did not mind taking and eating, say, the last piece of battered and deep fried seafood or vegetables on his plate. This, in spite of the urban legend, taken with a grain of salt and some awkward snickers, that classy diners always left some unfinished morsel on the table while uncouth ones left behind a gutted platter.
Near the end of their meals, his close friends often heard him insist, “Finish your food for the sake of the starving in Africa.” Some time in his youth, someone, a nun perhaps (he could not remember clearly), taught him and his peers about the basic connectedness of everyone. In Christian theology this is the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ—hit one, hit all in pedestrian language; the Butterfly Effect” of physics chaos theories.
A simplified example of the Butterfly Effect would run thus: Since the world is one, how a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo could trigger an earthquake in California. So he believed that how he conserved his food in Cebu could make a dent in the food supply for famished tribes in Africa.
His realist friend Angelo would counter, “Think first of the hungry in the Philippines!” Angelo is exceptional. Angelo has often spent time sharing meals with street children. He had no quarrel with Angelo. In fact he had none with people unlike Angelo. He only had hope that more and more of those who are privileged to eat may realize that they never had and will never have the right to heap so much on their plate as to guarantee food waste. Sometimes it took a mystical thought spared for undernourished Africans to jolt people to the reality of their own fortune in contrast to the ill-fed begging right outside a restaurant.
Mysticism, however, is neither a propaganda tool nor a denial of the present and visible. Which is why he appreciated his senior colleague Joji who collected leftover chicken bones after a recent lunch meeting. The bones were to go to a canine’s kennel. He wished more of his friends knew how to eat chicken down to the cartilage. They were often fazed by the challenge of pinching meat off the many chambers of the fowl’s cooked neck, breast, thigh and tail. In his eyes, they only nibbled at chicken parts and left them barely eaten.
He feared the consequences of an extended leftover fad on the world’s mystical and visible food basket. He heard from Paolo, a crusader in a group called Slow Food International about the mountains of leftovers turned out of Western dining rooms. A report released in 2012 by the United States Natural Resources Defense Council said Americans throw away 40 percent of their food supply every year. That is up to US $2,275 in food annually. Part of the reason is that diners and restaurants put more food on a plate than a man can consume.
As he pondered these things, two images crossed his mind. First, that of the pauper Lazarus, waiting with the dogs for grub in the scraps that would fall off the table of opulent Dives. Second image: That of the Galilean Teacher who told the parable of Lazarus, this time instructing his disciples to collect leftovers from the feasts of bread and fish that he threw—one for a crowd of at least five thousand, another for at least four thousand.
How much power do these images still possess, he wondered. Can they rouse food-rich societies to fast from wastefulness and feast on sharing?
As Lent, the season of fasting and abstinence neared, he was in Rome. There he met fellow scribe Nebiat, an Ethiopian. In areas of her home country, the United Nations World Food Program continues to project food insecurity that requires “humanitarian interventions.” He felt her people should be exempt from exercises to maintain balance in the world’s food basket. But the Ethiopian Orthodox people, she said, fast for at least forty days in the runup to the August feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. For her part, in honor of an ancestor who was a nun, she fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays all year.
