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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_waste |
My grandfather told me everything I needed to know to live well: how to do what needed to be done, when to do it, for how long or by how much, and why for. Between he and my grandmother, there wasn't anything that they couldn't cover with their accumulated knowledge base over the years. It's also how I know when their remaining family are totally full of shit: because they told it to me first. It's freaky how often their skills come up in my life, like besting a cashier at the grocery store in, what is to me, a simple game of sorting shapes and sizes that allows me to expertly pack bags that they can't. See? Like that. You do your job like that.
It's not really a contest between us, is what I'm saying to you. Together, we packed up cars to go to the Jersey Shore with the diva belongings of every over-packed (and over-shopped) drama queen's stuff nestled perfectly in the back (just in case one of them, you know, actually got off his/her fat ass to interact with a living breathing human who did not give birth to them and/or nurse them daily), because if we didn't manage their belongings expertly, we'd have to sit on the hump in the middle sandwiched between their ill-bought fantasies. We've all been there with family like that, haven't we? Healthy people in sick families have their brilliantly exciting lives pushed aside by the sick, when they are the ones in the margins of life, looking at us from the sidelines while we excel behind their deliberately turned backs. Convenient timing, isn't it?
But like my fathers sayings, my grandparents never really died in me, and they're here with me now. I don't mean allegorically, like some overblown Off-Broadway "dramedy" with sighing ghost-rattled chains and showily exaggerated moans of disbelief, but actually embodied in my living faith that's theirs as well. What began (and ended) with your brief encounter at thrifty living during seventh grade "Home Ec" class became the ethos we need(ed) to survive your major economic downturns, the very same that fill the sanitariums and rehabs with the many afflicted among us who cannot cope with change. FYI, I bought rice and beans during the last "economic downturn". When we need(ed) to save on your utility bills, we turn(ed) off the lights and looked for apartments on the cheap with large, tall windows that bring in the natural light of day, hated as that may be for cretinous behavior.
We're saying that we know your waste is manufactured to foul the earth deliberately and that it stops today, because we made laws (furtively and secretively behind your back....kidding! It's on the books because we made them, and like, wrote them out and stuff). Besides, your total dipshit ways aren't working anymore, or ever. From now on, restaurants and other food distributors will be penalized ($$$) every time they're caught throwing out food that can be used legally, without excessive spoilage, for human consumption. Ditto for all restaurants, food trucks, sidewalk carts, and other fine purveyors of foods.
My grandfather often quoted a Barese saying at the beginning of each meal as "mangia tutta casa", which in direct translation means to "eat the house" but in actuality meant "take all you want, eat all you take" as in "don't eat us out of house and home" with your rampantly unchecked and aggressively compulsive eating addiction, yo. Because my grandparents raised themselves, their sick families, and their children's children in times of great depressions, they knew (like me) exactly what family members with severe addictive disorders do, in addition to what all those other highly toxic and deeply anti-social behaviors do to the rest of the members of a family: they unfairly tax those who of us who can control their consumption unchecked unlike say, a watcher of weight addicted to junk food. In the excellent words of my grandfather if you "waste not, (you) want not" and that's how we feel about life, because that's how we live it: without waste. Nothing goes to waste in our happy homes. Welcome to the New World Order. You're welcome, by the way!
