Tonight’s meal will be steak with all the trimmings and I can’t wait. Nothing – bar a heard of wildebeest running through the dining room – will stop me from finishing it. For I know it will be delicious and that the meat was expensive. My mother has taught me well: ‘waste not, want not.’
Many of us believe it is important to eat everything on our plate. I have yet to find anyone who wasn’t told by their parents at some point to “Clear your plate – and think of all the starving children in ______” It’s the kind of parenting instruction that seems common-sense but it not taught everywhere; in several East Asian cultures, for example, it is far more courteous to leave some leftovers at the end of a meal. Our peculiar attitudes to plate-clearing are almost certainly a throwback to wartime health campaigns. In years of hardship through both World Wars, government posters would read “Leave a clean dinner plate: thousands are starving in Europe”. Oh, how times change: In 2015, one in four adults in the UK are obese (in the USA, it is one in three). Frighteningly, childhood obesity is also on the rise and today a third of all UK 10-11 year olds are overweight or obese.