Today I’m hitting you with two stories that will make you:
- First, chuckle.
- Then go, “oh wait a second.”
- And then finally go, “damnit Steve did you just teach me a life lesson?”
Let’s dive in, shall we?
The Christmas Ham
A little girl watched her mother bake a ham for Christmas dinner.
She noticed that her mom cut the ends off both sides before it went into the oven.
This little girl was quite inquisitive, so she asked, “Mom, why do we cut the ends off the ham before baking it?”
The mom replied, “I think it helps the ham cook all the way through… but honestly, I do it that way because that’s the way Gramma taught me!”
So that night at dinner, the little girl is sitting next to Gramma. And she says “Gramma, why do you cut the ends off your ham?”
And Gramma says “When I was a little girl, that’s how Great Gramma used to cook her ham too, so it’s kind of a tradition!.”
Fortunately, Great Gramma is still crushing life in her 90s, but couldn’t make the trip for Christmas.
So they all facetime Great Gramma from the dining room table, and when it’s the little girl’s turn to talk, she asked the same question:
“Great Gramma, when you cooked Christmas Ham, why did you cut the ends off? Was it to make the ham cook better or something?”
Great Gramma started laughing:
“Honey, I cut the ends off the ham because back in the 1930s, our oven was so small we had to cut the ends off the ham to make it fit!”
The Clean Plate Club
During 1917, it was believed that “food will win [The Great War].”
President Woodrow created the Food and Fuel Control Act, which gave the president the power to regulate the distribution, export, import, purchase, and storage of food.
Wilson put Herbert Hoover in charge, who started devising strategies to decrease the nation’s food consumption and waste.
This would free up more food to be shipped over to Europe to feed the soldiers on the front lines.
Hoover came up with a strategy to encourage people to not waste food. He turned it into a patriotic mission and had households sign pledge cards like:
“At the table I'll not leave a scrap of food upon my plate. And I'll not eat between meals, but for suppertime I'll wait."
So, the government encouraged people to not snack, to not put more food on their plate than if necessary.
But if they DID place food on their plates, they must finish it all, because every under consumed or wasted meal was one less meal that could be sent to soldiers in Europe.
This is how a "Clean Plate" became a catchphrase that appeared in hundreds of posters across the country.
This became ingrained in entire generations of Americans:
It’s probably why your grandmother told your mother to clean her plate, because not eating all the food on it would be wasteful.
It might also be why your mom told you when you were a kid “there are starving kids in XYZ country, and you don’t get dessert unless you ate everything on your plate.”
Are your rules still serving you?
In the first story, Gramma cut the ends off her ham because there wasn’t enough room in the oven. It was a question of constraints and scarcity.
In the second story, the “Clean Plate” club was created in times of food scarcity, in which wasted food literally could have been sent to feed soldiers in Europe.
In both stories, the foundation is “scarcity.” Scarcity is also the environment in which humans (and every other animal) has existed for 99.99% of history.
Food meant survival. Wasted food might mean death.
The problem is that we’re no longer trying to survive in scarcity…
We are drowning in abundance.
We have access to more food, comfort, entertainment, and dopamine hits that at any other time in human history.
It's time to re-evaluate the scarcity-driven rules of the past:
- Let’s ask questions about our relationship with food.
- Let’s get curious about why we feel guilty if we don’t eat all the food on the plate.
- Let’s think about other “rules” we've accepted into our lives and where they come from.
They say that “generals are always fighting the last war.” Meaning they use the tactics that would have won the last war, but won’t help in the next war.
We might be living by rules from a different time and place.
Let’s do some Swedish Death Cleaning and remove certain rules that no longer make sense.
If you have the courage to ask “why,” and a willingness to let go…
We can come up with some new rules for modern times.
-Steve
