Member-only story
Clean Your Plate
Reflections on childhood poverty and its imprint on adult eating habits.
I gave my toddler half of my dinner roll at dinner the other night. After briefly licking at the margarine, he chucked the whole thing down from his highchair onto the floor. My husband retrieved it and set it on the table. I picked the roll up, examined it for specks, and moved to eat it.
“You don’t want to do that,” my husband said. “It fell butter-side down!”
“Butter-side down is a law of the universe,” I joked.
“Come on, have some self-respect,” he said, a note of alarm in his voice.
The look on his face expressed a kind of embarrassment or exasperation toward me.
I put the roll down, saying, “I don’t really need it anyway.”
After a few blinking seconds, he said, “I’m sorry. You can eat it if you want to.”
But I didn’t eat it. I threw it away.
I didn’t go to kindergarten. I started school as a full-day first-grader, clueless of the rituals my classmates already knew by heart. There’s not a lot I remember clearly about first grade back in the year of 1983.
But I remember the feeling of school, and that feeling was security. Security was knowing I was going to be…
