Seeing the Big Picture
Haven't we all heard at one point or another: "You haven't finished your food. Think about all the starving children in Africa!"
It is a really stupid thing to say when you think about it. How is me finishing my food going to help the poor starving children in Africa?
If anything, it will help them less. Think about it this way. I live in a country where there is overflow of food. If I am not finishing my food it is probably because I am already full. If I force down the rest, it is only gonna make me bigger. If I keep at it for long enough I will get obese and with that comes health problems. Health problems will cost society money and if bad enough I will not be able to work as much
or at all and hence I wont pay taxes. In addition, other people's tax money will have to pay social
benefits for me. This means that there is less money the government has to donate to
development aid.
No, it doesn't really help them does it?
Self-Service?
I agree it's not very logical. Nobody has to prod kids into eating more chocolate cake - I think the real issue is making kids eat healthy stuff they don't like. If that's it, we should educate them about nutrition instead of making them feel guilty...
This made me think about dinner guests. It's so awkward to put food on other people's plates. If you put too much (or they don't like it), they'll feel obliged to finish it. If you don't put enough, they might feel awkward about asking for seconds.
My latest strategy is to put everything on the table, and have everybody serve themselves, but then you lose control over the presentation. I like the model where food is put in a central bowl, from which everybody scoops it up by hand with pieces of bread (like in Ethiopea), but that doesn't lend itself to every dish or every guest...
Double moral?
There was an article in one of the Norwegian newspapers lately which talked about how wrong it was to tell children that they shouldn't eat sweets because they were unhealthy and then bribe them to clean their room by promising them sweets. Double moral they called it. This had never occurred to me and I found it interesting to think about.
I remember thinking fruits were almost as great as candy when I was a kid. Probably because they were not that easy to get your hands on and expensive so it was more rare to have them. Now with easy accessibility and the fact that we are supposed to eat so and so many fruits a day that has been kind of ruined for parents. It is no longer special to get a mandarin or grapes.
Even though I was picking on the "think about the starving children.." sentence I do understand its purpose previously and in a way it is still valid. You should be grateful that you have enough food, not everyone is equally lucky. It is a waste to take plenty of food on your plate and then throw it away. It is waste to make more than you need because you want to make sure you have enough. That is at least something I need to be reminded of!
I can relate to the dinner guest dilemna in a way. I usually don't make fancier dinners than it being self serve (except maybe appertizers). But it is difficult to know when to offer people more because they will feel obliged to have more but at the same time make sure people aren't too shy to have more. My only solution so far is to serve wine with food which usually make people feel more relaxed:-). Maybe I should give myself a challenge of actually making something that I arrange in a nice way on a place...
dinner guests...
I like cooking. I serve stuff either on a plate or all in the middle, or some combination, according to a couple of factors:
1. How easy it is. Some things lend themselves to self-service, and not to being divided in advance. Other things are the exact opposite. Also, the more people there are the less I am likely to plate things individually. It's OK for a dozen, given a decent sized kitchen (actually mine is painful for more than about 8) but more than that and it's time to be planning the menu for entirely self-serve food. Putting a larger number of meals on plates and getting them served is quite a skill and takes people who really know what they are doing (normally more than one of them, at that scale).
2. How much there is. In general I expect people to be a bit more wasteful than me if I am trying to stretch a meal, a bit less if I have more than I need. So it isn't uncommon for me to share out the things that are only in small amounts, and let people help themselves to the things that are in plenty (hello, potatoes).
But basically I rely on people to say if they want more, and not eat what they don't want. A friend of mine who was a schoolteacher once put all the kids' lunch leftovers in an envelope, wrote "Biafra" on it, and put it in the outbox. As you say, encouraging people to eat more than they need is bad. The real problem is encouraging them to take more than they need in the first place. So I trust my friends to think like adults. It works pretty well actually.
Big Party
Makes sense.
I don't think I've ever had more than 8 dinner guests - I also don't have a huge family, so that's something I'm not used to. Even with just a few guests, I can feel the tension rise between my wife and I, in the last few hours when we're trying to synchonize everything. We get stressed out and snap at each other. If we ever had a dozen people over, we'd need to hide the knives first...
Stress is not good for the food
Hehe:-) I think my record is 7 and that was about as much as I could handle. Then again, even more and I wouldn't even have time to snap at anyone:-).
I guess the trick is to give yourself enough time to do everything. I actually enjoy cooking if I can calmly chop the vegetables, organize anything, and have a glass of whine while cooking. And if you have fun with it, the food is also better. Stress and cooking don't go well together.
Not really a parallel, but ...
What you wrote above reminded me of ppl who typically say something like:
"So, you're a feminist, eh? But women in Norway have come so far -- if you care so much about women's rights, why aren't spending all your time fighting for the rights of down-trodden women in third world countries? Eh?"
Feel free to insert e.g. "freedom of speech" for "women's rights", etc.
--
The knuckles! The horrible knuckles!
Frustrating
Yes, I have noticed this too:-).