One Country’s Table Scraps, Another Country’s Meal

This article reminds me of me one Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner at my Grandparents’ house. I was helping Grandma Wilson transfer food from the cooking pots to the table dishes. I had dished up the mashed potatoes and was starting on the green beans when Grandma picked up the potato pot and said, “you left enough in here for one more kid,” and started scraping the rest out of the pot. Born in 1920, she was a child of the Great Depression and never completely forgot the lean times and what that did to her family. I was a child of the baby boom – a time of prosperity, mass consumerism and waste. Nothing brought the differences of our formative years home to me more than watching her scrap that pot until there was no hint of potatoes left.