Meh, not necessarily if we’re talking about guests who are the host’s children. There’s some deference there.
~Max
My advice goes double if you’re talking about your adult children.
That reads to me very much as if they feel they got bugged about it so often that they had to ask their hosts to please shut up on the subject. If that’s what happened, opening a conversation about wasting food is a very bad idea; it amounts to refusing to respect the previous request.
That reads to me very much as if you’re saying “don’t eat very much, because we want to be able to get tomorrow’s food out of this as well as today’s.”
If you want so badly to have the food for tomorrow, or genuinely need to have the food for tomorrow, then don’t put that portion of it out in the first place. Offering food to one’s guests and then asking them not to eat it would be . . . really strange; and not in a pleasant direction of strange.
If you’re that worried about waste, pack up whatever they left on their plates and send it home with them. If you shop in any sort of ordinary modern fashion, you take home packages from the store that can be washed and used for the purpose, even though the store thought of them as throwaways. Or throw it all in the soup pot and re-cook it, and eat it yourselves.
Or you could get a dog. Though if you don’t like dogs, that would be unkind to the dog.
– it’s always been my general impression that one’s supposed to invite other people to dinner, or to accept dinner invitations, for the pleasure of the conversation. The food is a side benefit, and both complaining about what’s provided and commenting on what and how much anybody’s eating would be, I was taught, very rude.
Did I get this right, your daughter and her husband are the guests who take too much, and you don’t know how to plate food?
How did you raise your daughter? You do have an obligation as host is too provide a pleasant meal for your guests, but they have a responsibility to be polite guests also. Guests should never serve themselves more than they can eat, and shouldn’t serve more than what a reasonable person would consider a serving no matter how hungry they are. And plating food is easy. Give everyone the same size serving. If it’s not a lot divvy up the whole pan, otherwise everyone gets the same size portion. If there is food left after the meal offer seconds if you like.
I know it can be tough to deal with your family and keep everyone happy, it gets to me too sometimes, makes hard to work things out right, but this one has pretty straightforward common sense solutions.
Yes I wondered if they might be Chinese. I was once a guest at a Chinese dinner and didn’t know about this and kept finishing my plate and couldn’t persuade them not to refill it - not realising that it was me cleaning my plate that meant as good hosts they were obliged to keep refilling it for as long as I kept emptying it.
I could not say if this is a habit, form of dieting, form of passion-aggression or misguided optimism. But if it bothers you, the solution is to dole out smaller amounts with seconds and even thirds if desired.
People eat less of food is served on smaller plates.
Oof, yeah, on rereading it, it does. So scratch that advice.
I’m still sympathetic to Dinsdale’s dislike of what’s happening, but when I look closely at why, I think it’s because of my own emotional reaction. When I cook a meal, a clean plate is something I take as an implicit compliment, and a full plate is something I take as an implicit criticism. The full plate means that folks didn’t like what I cooked.
I’m in no way saying that’s a rational takeaway, so there’s no need for anyone to reason me out of the position. But I’m unhappy to see full plates at the end of a meal I make.
This was going to be my advice - use smaller plates.
One of the casinos I worked at had a buffet that was in view of the gaming floor – only a low wall separating the two. One night a guy loaded up a plate with over two-dozen three-inch chocolate chip cookies on top of whatever else he might have eaten. When he stopped and pushed the plate away after eating about four the buffet manager approached and stood over him making him eat more until he begged for mercy, about a dozen.
When I’m at a buffet I’ll take a fair amount on the first trip through – I can always get more – but smaller and smaller amounts on subsequent trips. Once though, at a breakfast buffet with the tongs I picked up a fried-together lump of bacon and tried to break it up into more like what I wanted. I touched it, Oh crap, bit the bullet and wound up with about a half-pound cooked weight of bacon.
Luckily the others at the table were willing to help me out.
I wish auto correct would stop making me look illiterate. (Realizes you can turn it off. Does so.)
Yeah, that didn’t happen.
Okie dokie, skipper. Guess my eyes were deceiving me.
Maybe you just mis-interpreted what happened. No restaurant manager in his right mind would treat a customer like that. He’d likely lose his job.
Guilt-trip your guests incessantly about the starving children in India Mongolia Somalia Bangladesh Ukraine.
Storytime #1: I lived for three years in a shack on the beach in Honolulu, alongside a marina on one side and a large beach and park on the other side. (For those who know the area, it was at Kewalo Basin Marina and Ala Moana Beach Park.) The park was full of concession stands selling hot box lunches. The tourists invariably ate half their box lunches and threw the rest in the trash. In the marina there lived a totally crazy homeless dude. Everybody knew him as “Bonzai”. He had some crazy homeless friends too. They fished the wasted food out of the trash cans, and had bottomless sumptuous banquets, which they ate off of beat-up hubcap plates, while sitting in the marine parking lot.
Storytime #2: I went shopping on the day before Thanksgiving to buy some deli items for a potluck I was invited to. While shopping, late in the afternoon, I noticed a clerk taking down all the hot baked chickens that were left – there were about a dozen of them. They were in plastic containers with cardboard carriers around them. The clerk took the cardboard carriers off of them and neatly folded and stacked them. I asked her what she was doing. She said they kept the cardboard carriers to re-use them the next day, but the chickens went in the trash. I asked, can’t you cut up the chickens into pieces, refrigerate them, and sell the pieces the next day? No, they can’t do that. Then, can’t you donate them to the homeless people in the park, of whom there are many? Surely, a charity group will come around to all the stores to collect their leftover chickens. No, they can’t do that either. Sooner or later someone will get food poisoning if the chickens didn’t get refrigerated properly, and there will be lawsuits all around. I think throwing out all those perfectly good baked chickens was a crime against humanity.
Maybe I also misheard what the buffet staff told me.
We have had many big dinners and it just struck me I have no idea who ate or didn’t eat what or how much.
I could hardly miss, though, my son-in-law raising his large soup bowl, at a table of 12 people or so, and loudly slurping down a lot of his soup. That stuck with me. That seems O.K. in private, but not something you do at a state dinner. I did not mention it to him, of course. That’s the way he was taught.
I never really gave it much thought, but it turns out that most of the time, when I have guests for dinner, this is just what I do. No special reason except that it seems easiest all around – bringing the guests their plates restaurant-style, nicely arranged, rather than passing around troughs of food in the manner of a large family. Things like gravy or other condiments will be on the table, of course.
Though sometimes I’ll do a hybrid thing with certain items, like when the entree is a bunch of small-ish items like kabobs or sausages. Instead of trying to guess whether someone might want one, two, or three, I just set out a big serving plate.
But most of the time, plating in the kitchen works best. If it’s something like roast beef, I’ll ask what doneness they prefer, but do the carving in the kitchen. And of course if someone wants seconds, I make another trip to the kitchen, where the item is likely kept warm and in better shape than sitting out on the table.
Sorry if it reads a way entirely different than happened. Their eldest seemed to becoming extremely picky about what she would eat. We want to provide nutritious and tasty food our guests will like, as well as supporting our child’s parenting decisions, so we discussed whether we should have different food - ike vanilla yogurt - for the child, whether we should prepare only certain meals, whether we should encourage them to try new things, whether we should ignore the behavior. But sure, feel free to assume we were being controlling, judgmental, and all other things bad.
I’m honestly surprised at all of the suggestions to plate food for guests. I’m trying to think of a meal in which we have done so, or anyone else’s home at which meal was individually plated. I guess I always figure the guest is better able than I to decide how much of which dishes they want. If someone doesn’t want the vegetable, I feel it would be rude of me to put it on their plate - where it will just get wasted. And if someone wants a huge or small serving of one thing or another, I feel it polite as a host to allow them to make that decision. Heck, even if we are serving burgers, I fill up a plate of burgers and a plate of buns - pointing out any that have “special orders.”
Sure - food gets wasted on a huge scale all over the place, but the one place I have ANY real impact on such waste is in my own home. No, this is not at all a big deal. Just something that is quite different from how I feel about food and waste.
And no - we are not Chinese.
Yeah, I’m hesitant to plate people’s food, too, even kids’ food anymore unless they’re small enough they can’t serve themselves, and even then I ask them to come with me and tell me how much.
We used to eat dinner pretty often with this one couple - he was a friend I knew from college and he’d married shortly after. Both insisted their kids’ food be pre-plated and preferred to pre-plate for mine as well. And they were all members of the “Clean Plate Club.” They wouldn’t allow any of the kids to leave the table until each plate was empty. My kids won’t eat or drink if they’re presented with too much food or drink at a time - even at 15 and 12. And I definitely don’t want them eating if they’re already full. Apparently I countermanded the couple one too many times by either not letting them plate my kids’ food or not enforcing the clean plate rule at my own house, so we don’t hang out all that frequently anymore.
It’s weird how touchy food can be. Both of them were otherwise very nice, but very strange about food. If we got takeout, sharing dishes was never, ever allowed (even Chinese which usually amounts to three or four portions) and they’d get really irritable if I even suggested the kids share an order. We started doing family game nights instead if we do hangout - we usually bring snacks or sweets, but making it even more casual has way less potential to tick someone off.
I’d have to say that as a guest, I figure I’m getting free food, so I’m not complaining if the host wants to plate it for me or serve it buffet style or sling it across the room with some kind of homemade trebuchet. I reckon my limit would be that I’m saying no thanks if the aforementioned flinging results in the food going splat on the floor, but I’m guessing it’s not likely someone would try that anyway.
But that’s just me. Gimme some free food.