Wastefulness and plenty are thorny subjects for most Americans. We are embarrassed by our bounty. We want to be generous, but often live double lives in our attempts to share what we have with those who most need. Having enough without stockpiling is a struggle for many. I have a wholesale warehouse membership where I can purchase a container of baking powder large enough to double as a child’s bench. We daily take for granted that there will always be more of everything available to us. Paradoxically, we act like a great famine is upon us as we purchase in bulk without considering the implications of overabundance.
So what about food? Living in a middle-class cocoon of plenty, it is hard to imagine being hungry to the point of starvation. It isn’t that our mothers didn’t try to instill this understanding in our pea-sized brains. How many times were you reminded of the famished children in Africa as you sat before your half-eaten plate of some despised casserole? I venture to guess that most of us heard her entreaty enough so that we wanted our mothers to affix stamps to our uneaten supper remnants and send them off to the Dark Continent First Class.
Flash forward thirty years to my chest freezer (otherwise known as the cavern of horrors) in my basement. Things go in, but very little comes out. Oversized bags of easy to prepare suppers get dropped into the frozen abyss. They seem like such a great idea when you are in the grocery store imagining you will need a ready supply of quick suppers. But those “presto-chango” bagged suppers aren’t seen again for months (or dare I say, even years.) Finally they are retrieved from the depths with a steady gloved hand while a solid bridge of freezer frost finds them adhering determinedly to a clumped bag of ice balls from last summer’s overzealous blueberry picker. Or maybe the last snowball of the season, also jammed into the freezer after having been carefully preserved by some nameless member of my family...
Enough is enough. I wonder what change we could cumulatively affect if we all ate the foods already available on our pantry shelves and in our icy freezers; directing that week’s grocery money to our local food banks or MCC for truly feeding the hungry. I challenge you to go home and eat anything still viable in your freezer. It’s time to defrost the abyss.
