Eating Habits

The Starving People in Europe and the Clean Your Plate Club

By Dan Rattiner

When I was growing up, all the other kids were thin. There might be one fat kid in school in our grade. And we’d tease him about it.

Today, all the kids growing up are fat. And there might be one thin person in school. Whether the kids tease him about it, I don’t know. But we all know what the health consequences are of everybody being fat these days, and we all know that it is probably caused by all the fried stuff we eat in the fast food joints.

I was thinking about this when I was down in Florida this past week visiting my mother, who is 94 years old. People remember my mom. She and my late father owned the drug store in Montauk for twenty-five years. So for those people, I want to say she is in great shape, we are going out to play some golf.

Also, she cooked for us the first night we were there. No big deal. But before we sat down at the dinner table, we had wine and crackers and dip.

And we talked about this business of people being all fat these days, and how it was so noticeable here where everybody is walking around in shorts and tank tops while back north, in February, everybody is all bundled up. We talked about how food was presented these days compared to all those years ago. And I asked her if she remembered when I was a small boy I had to finish everything that was on my plate when I had my dinner. She remembered.

“We called it the clean plate club,” she said.

We could smell dinner cooking in the kitchen. We sat, the three of us, my mother, me and my girlfriend Chris, around a glass table on the screen porch. The wine was Merlot. Every once in a while, we’d have a piece of cracker with some dip. As the subject was the clean plate club, it struck me just how many of these crackers I ate compared to the others. My mother had three, Chris had two. I had the rest. Which was about twelve, and which was enough, now that the others had stopped eating, to clean all the dip out of the container. I had totaled out at about half a pint of dip.

“You wouldn’t let me get up from the table unless I ate everything on my plate,” I said.

“That was the clean plate club,” Mom said.

“If, after I finished, there were three green peas in one corner of the plate, you’d make me finish them. I really came to believe in the clean plate club.”

“What was the clean plate club?” Chris asked.

“This was when I was five years old,” I said. “World War II was just coming to an end. And all of Europe lay in ruins. The idea was that if I didn’t clean my plate, and the food had to be thrown out, it was a sin. There were all these people starving in Europe.”

“That’s what I used to say. Think of all the people starving in Europe,” mom said.

“How did it help them for you to clean your plate?”

“It went back to where the food came from and how it had gotten to my plate. I really believed this. And it was true. The peas were grown on a farm. Then they were picked and packed in boxes and shipped out to stores not only all over the United States, but all over the world. So if I didn’t eat what was on my plate and it had to be thrown out, it meant that in a very real way, the starving children in Europe suffered. The farmers, if they had known ahead of time, could have routed my peas to Europe instead of sending them to me. It was my fault that had not happened.”

“And you believed this.”

“Yes, I did. Somewhere out on the farm there would be a list of where everything had to go. I had my share. I was expected to eat my share.” I thought a little further about this. “Also, I wanted to go out and play.”

The dinner was rice, broccoli and broiled salmon coated with spices. It was really, really good. And of course, I cleaned my plate.

My girlfriend is a psychotherapist. I’ve been with her a long, long time.

“It’s so interesting,” she said. “I think everybody has a problem with their parents. Everybody. If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Either they expected too much from you or they neglected you or they smothered you.”

“That’s why the world needs psychotherapists,” I said.

“But a couple of peas that didn’t get to Europe? I did notice you ate all the dip.”

“If you and mom had each eaten your share, I wouldn’t have had to eat so much.”

Chris started laughing.

“I heard a comedian the other day talking about how fat everybody is,” I said. “He said he’s started looking at the sides of boxes to see what he’s eating. He said he looked at the side of a box of Fig Newtons and it said there were just 120 calories in a portion and he thought that’s good. Then he looked at what a portion was. Two cookies. He said that’s not a portion, a SLEEVE of Fig Newtons is a portion. He was pretty funny.”

“My mother grew up in the Great Depression in the 1920s. That’s another perspective.”

“I just remembered something,” Chris said. “When I was little, my mother used to say ‘Better belly bust than good grub spoiled,’ I guess that was the same thing.”

“Not even close. No burned out buildings. No kids walking around in rags. Tomorrow at breakfast I’m going to ask my mom to tell us about ration books during the war. And how we collected bacon fat and aluminum pans for the war effort.”