A Food For Thought Story

The other day I was having lunch with a friend and I couldn’t help notice that she finished her meal leaving almost a third of her food on the plate untouched.

I mean her fork never so much as grazed over this portion of her dish. It was as if the food didn’t exist for her. Now I realize I’m easily 40 years her senior—and our eating styles come out of a whole different set of imperatives.

I grew up during the depths of the Great Depression. We were taught to ‘clean our plates.’ In the beginning, doing so was difficult for me. I dawdled over my food, was labeled a persnickety eater. I pushed the veggies around, picking my way through the debris I had created. My mom was beside herself, not just annoyed.

“Think of the poor Chinese kids,” she’d tell me. And I tried to understand what she meant. But I was only four. I didn’t know anything about Chinese kids. None lived on my block. We lived on East 2nd Street in Brooklyn.

Then one Saturday my mother decided I was old enough to go the matinee movies. My sister, four and a half years older than me, was to take me. It was a treat I hadn’t earned. Only years later did I realize the reward was my mother’s—a chance to have some time for herself.

I can still remember the excitement I felt as I toddled alongside my big sister. All the older kids talk all week long about the previous Saturday’s double feature. And now I was going to experience this very mysterious ritual. Over the next couple of years, I attended many Saturday matinees. But this first occasion is indelibly imprinted in my memory.

A Tom Mix cowboy picture was the first film. My eyes were glued to the black and white images flickering across the huge screen, everything bigger than life.
Cowboys on their horses galloping across open land studded with sagebrush, performing heroic deeds, brandishing six-shooters, Indians and Bad Men dropping to the dusty ground, gyrating with dramatic abandon. Everything happened with a lot of to-do.

The second feature was a Stooge Brothers’ slapstick comedy. Most of that went passed me. Not because I was too stupid to get the jokes. But because I was preoccupied with terror from what I had just seen marching across the silver screen.


I’m referring to the news clips that were shown between the two feature films. Outside of radio, newspapers and magazines, this is how people got the latest happenings. Pathé News introduced the news with a fanfare of music calculated to put one in a state of alarm.

And what I saw that first time I have never forgotten. The year was 1936. The Japanese Imperial Army was invading China. Now I was seeing real Chinese kids. I saw mobs of children, women and old men running for their lives before an onslaught of canon fire. Bombs burst all around them as they fled, terrified, their eyes rolling. I saw many of them fall to the ground, wounded and dying, the city in flames.

My God, I sucked in my breath. So this is what happens when you don’t clean your plate. It was a stern lesson I was getting.

That evening at supper my mother was surprised to say the least. Sobered from my matinee encounter, I silently and hastily ate my food. Every bit of it. No prompting was necessary. Not then, nor ever since.

Of course, by the time I was ten I realized that the connection I had made was a false conclusion. But by then my eating pattern was firmly established. I never talked about the false revelation that had come to me. And no one had to badger me into cleaning my plate.