I found myself hate-eating the taco.
Bite by excruciating bite, I masticated yet another gob of fish and tortilla. This one was vile, with soggy batter, a cheap, mass-produced corn tortilla, and wilty cabbage. Most of my being wanted to just chuck it in the trash, but I couldn’t bring myself to. So I sullenly swallowed it, lump by lump.
Hi, my name is Hank, and I am a member of the clean plate club.
I hate waste of all kinds, but I especially hate wasting animal protein because, well, a creature died for that taco, or panucho or tamal or whatever. And I asked for it, so the least I can do is eat the damn thing. Bleh. I get angry with myself for having eyes bigger than my stomach, and always wage that internal fight between wasting food and feeling bloated and unhappy.
Chances are you’ve felt this way, more than once. It’s a classic First World Problem.
I’m pretty good at managing it in real life, but when I am in Mexico, especially researching the cookbook, I find myself “needing” to try more and more, because as the great Mexican chef Enrique Olvera says, to make a great taco, you must eat a lot of tacos. And I’ve eaten a lot of tacos. And tamales, and caldos and ensaladas and ceviche and aguachile and, and, and…
I do this because Mexican food is not dogmatic. Even “set” dishes like tacos gobernador or cochinita pibil or pozole have endless variation. Each cook adds her own sazon, or personal flair, to the dish. But there are still boundaries, and it’s important to know them if I want to accurately represent the cuisine.
I also eat so much there because I almost always see a dish that’s new to me, like the first time I saw tacos de marlin or gaoneras or empalmes. Gotta have it!
One way to offset abject gluttony while simultaneously experiencing a place is to walk it off. One a recent trip, I walked no less than 5 miles each day, each step clearing calories (and arteries). This is pretty normal for me — and is also why I’m not 300 pounds.
Another trick has been to carefully time my eating, and limiting it to two real meals and then maybe little bites here and there. It’s a kinda-sorta intermittent fast that lets me enjoy bigger meals when I have them. But even still, sometimes I find myself combat eating.
This, alas, happens most often when I arrive at a place where the chef knows me. Again, yeah, I know, total First World Problem, right? But there’s a habit most chefs have to “kill” their friends with food, and plate after plate just keeps showing up.
No possible way to eat it all. So there’s waste. And I hate that. A lot.
If there’s a country that wastes more food than the US, I am not aware of it. Food waste in this country is appalling. There’s a whole genre of memes about buying healthy foods to watch them rot in your fridge. Bleh.
I am not immune. I’ve had to toss cilantro more than once, and some $4 black kale I bought turned yellow while I was in Mexico. But one thing I almost never waste is animal protein, especially wild game and fish.
Not only did that animal die for my table, but I was the one who killed it. So it would be a double karmic blast. The only time I’ve tossed game is with a recipe test that went so horribly wrong I couldn’t save it; a broken emulsion on a failed duck sausage hot dog attempt was so foul even the cats wouldn’t eat it. But even in that case, the backyard possums sure did.
So what to do?
Start by just being more mindful of what you buy in both restaurants and for your house. Do you really need that? Will you eat it before it goes bad? Will you? Really? Thinking twice has helped me put back on the shelf thousands of dollars worth of yummy looking stuff that I knew deep in my heart I had no immediate need for. It’ll be there when I am ready.
In a restaurant setting, I liken my tactic to the Greek meze tradition: You lay out lots of wonderful things, but not enough for everyone to have everything. They must choose, and ergo miss out on a potential delight. I love this, because it makes for some fun dinner conversations, and in a restaurant it may spur you to return another time to try that thing you didn’t get.
I do have to hand it to the mommy bloggers who obsess on detailed meal planning. They’ve gotten good at this out of financial necessity — I could not imagine buying $300 worth of groceries only to see your picky crumbsnatchers turn up their noses at it. [Reason no. 34058 why I am not a father.]
Sitting down and planning, at least on a piece of scrap paper, has helped me determine what to buy and what to thaw from the freezer without waste. More or less.
Creative use of leftovers and scraps and such is an important skill that if I were king I’d require every person to learn it. We’re all so rich now, comparatively speaking, that few of us need to do anything with stale bread, the stems of things like parsley or broccoli, or bones or offal or leftover roast deer. So in many, many cases, they hit the bottom of the trash can.
If you want guidance on this, you can do no better than to start with the wonderful book An Everlasting Meal, by Tamar Adler. It’s a homage to How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher, who is in my opinion America’s greatest food writer, live or dead. Fisher’s book on kitchen thrift stems from rationing in World War II. Adler’s is more of a thoughtful reflection on how to quietly not be a part of Wasteful Nation.
Save stems. Boil citrus peels to make your house smell nice. Make stocks. Lots of stocks. Get a pressure canner to store them in the pantry. Buy only what you need, plus one “want” each week so you don’t feel like you’re punishing yourself. Don’t buy breadcrumbs, make them. Skip that extra taco.
There are a thousand ways to do your bit. Pick a few. Make them you. Add another. You’ll be happy you did.
Hank, I have been quietly practicing 0 waste for years, at home. I have two working compost piles. Any food waste goes there. I have a compost bucket on the counter..A chicken or turkey carcass, after making stew or stock, goes into the woods beyond the compost pile, which feeds fox and coyotes, raccoons, etc one of the issues here however, is that my occasional roommates/housemates or tenants, do not “get” it… I find food leftovers in the trash…. Pizza, Burger King, McDonalds etc. and even when I explain it to them, they do not get or do it. My next door neighbors feed many leftovers to their chickens. We have a compost pile between us with bedding from the chicken coop, coffee, anything. I wish more people practiced this
Leftover food doesn’t get wasted at my place. What the cat doesn’t eat the poultry will, and scraps unsuited to them go to feed the compost. And such citrus peels as don’t get candied or used in cordials or liqueurs can be dried to use as firelighters.