Waste Not....Want Not!

As a child growing up, I can remember my Aunt B. B. in the kitchen cooking, greens, fried corn, smothered chicken, pinto beans, and a few of my other favorites. Piling them up on my plate and telling me to "eat it all". I'll be damned if I didn't try my hardest, to eat that grown woman size portion put on my plate. I mean the food was good, and waste not want not right? Or how about mama cooking and reminding you about all them kids you see over in Africa, that would love to be eating what you're eating. So you best eat everything on your plate and not be wasteful. Who knew that the "waste" she should have been worried about was my own.



A few years ago, as I took on the responsibility of raising a child, certain things in my head began to click. Situations from my childhood came to mind as I heard myself repeat the same things to this child, that had been told to me coming up. Eat all your food, so you can be big and strong. Yeah you'll be BIG alright, eating those grown folks size portions. I began to recall the countless times my mama made me sit at the table, till I fell asleep in my plate, because I still had food on it, and swore I was done eating and she swore I was not. Maybe if the portions on my plate were kid size, I would have ate just that and been done, instead of being punished for leaving food on my plate. It was a difficult task getting the older generation to see where I was coming from, but after many a night of me repeating, that no child would be punished for not finishing a plate, I finally got my point across.



Maybe just maybe the reason why some of us were fat kids, had more to do with not having portion control than the genes that made us. Just maybe if we had not been forced to gorge ourselves on dinner nightly, we would have learned its OK to just eat till full, even if that means there is food left on your plate. Think about that next time you've got lil Johnny at the table, eating 4 times the portion for a kid his age and you wonder why he is busting out of his gym shorts.



Look all I'm saying is, maybe we need to take stock of some of the things we were told as kids that really wasn't necessarily true, or right and try not to pass that mess on to our kids. I'm sure it will help them in the long run. I know mama and daddy did the best they could to raise us up right and I'm not knocking them, I'm just saying, we are all responsible for our children's health and well being and for some of our kids, eating EVERYTHING on their plates is so not healthy....




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