When I was twelve I had a friend who’s family was fairly well off. I have a lot of memories that showcase the extreme disparity between us, but the time we ate lunch together at his parents’ tennis club is perhaps the most clear. He ordered this plate of nachos and after eating only about 1/3 of it he threw it away. I looked at him as if he’d just eaten the face off a newborn child. “What?? Why did you do that? It was perfectly good to eat!” cried I. He said, simply, that he was done eating and wasn’t hungry anymore.

Anyone who has been to weight watchers knows what the “clean plate club” is, and for those who aren’t familiar with the term I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. We are people who feel a compulsive need to eat every speck of food on our plates. Over the course of my life, I’ve met some people who have this particular conditioned behavior something fierce. It causes them overwhelming psychological pain to see just one bite of food thrown away, even if it’s on someone else’s plate. I’ve witnessed people sit and miserably stuff themselves, sometimes on the brink of tears, because they just cannot bring themselves to “waste” it.

I’m ok with tossing a few bites into the trash now and then, but I don’t like it. The thought of throwing away half a plate of food is utterly disgusting to me, but the logic of overeating so as to not waste has always seemed a little . . . stinky. I’ve been rolling this over in my head, and last week I had somewhat of a revelation. The more we eat, the more our stomachs expand to fit more food, hence the more we need to eat in order to be satisfied. Serving sizes in restaurants reflect this trend; they are two, three, four times what they were 50 years ago, and growing ever more absurd by the day. Think of all that extra food each American eats over the course of their lifetime, consumed for no good reason but because of our ever expending stomaches; think of what an incredible, unbelievable waste of food that is.

The USDA estimates that the average American consumes a little less than 5 pounds of food per day.¹ I think we could probably get by with only 2/3 of that, but for the sake of simplicity let’s say we could train ourself to eat 1 pound less of food each day. That’s 365 pounds per American, which would be approximately 110,981,799,260 pounds of food per year saved.

That’s over one hundred and ten billion pounds of food, per year, saved.

Multiply that over the average American lifespan and you get a number that is so big it’s unfathomable to most people. I realize these numbers are a gross generalization and some people shouldn’t cut out a pound of food, but even if most people can’t, the people who can would still save billions of pounds of resources a year. At the beginning of the year I significantly lessened my food intake, to perhaps half of what I was eating before. Let’s say I eat 1.5 pounds a day less than I used to (I’m sure it’s more, but let’s go with that to be conservative) and I live another 60 years; I alone will save 32,850 pounds.

No starving children in Africa are benefiting from me stuffing my face. In fact, they might benefit from me not thoughtlessly consuming resources. I know the earth benefits from me consuming less and producing less trash, my health benefits from me weighing less, and my bank account benefits from me spending less on food. Next time you start to feel guilty for the food left on your plate, think of the food you could be saving after a few weeks of conditioning yourself to eat less. I think it’s time we started recognizing the clean plate club for what it really is: just another bad excuse to eat more food.

1. www.usda.gov