My parents teaching me to always finish my plate certainly played a role in my severe obesity. It had two undesirable effects:

• I need to calculate my food intake before starting to prepare a meal. Of course this is too much work to be bothered with, so for a decade I just cooked way too high quantities without even noticing it.


• Because meals were pretty long and boring as a kid, since the sine qua non condition for leaving the table was finishing my plate, I became a really fast eater; habit that I have not overcome to this day. Results that because stomach feedback isn't instant, if you put me in front of a infinite amount of food and ask me to eat until I reach satiety, I will overeat.

On another hand, I understand Carol in the sense that food should preferably never be binned. In an ideal world, anyone with a beginning of a garden would get incentives to make their own compost from food waste and grow whatever they like outside. But of course, our personal food waste is insignificant compared to (for instance) supermarkets'. Over here, just from the bakery of a single one of them, there is enough "to be thrown away" bread and sugary things to fill half a car boot on a daily basis.

Of course I don't condone Carol's behaviour and your link to the wartime routine is probably spot on.

(As a side-note, I don't believe that something as dry and full of preservatives as Pringles has gone stale after a mere two months!)