My friend leaned over
the table as if to impart a great secret. “Do you think the
waiter will believe that I am taking the pastrami home for a raccoon?” She
spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. And indeed, she was revealing a deep dark
secret. After decades of chuckling at the antics of elders who piled dinner rolls
into their purses and packets of sugar into their pockets, we Boomers are doing it now,
too.
I can remember my Aunt
Annie bringing an old New York Times to every wedding and bar mitzvah.
Her modus operandi was to roll the pages up in a cone, like fish and chips from
a London food stand. Then she would eye the banquet hall as if to case the
joint for a robbery. Next thing you knew, all the better leftovers were piled high
in the paper “for later.”
My mother took food
home, too. She used tinfoil—the days of take-home containers were not yet upon
us. My mom was delighted the first time a waiter asked her if she wanted a doggie
bag. What a great cover for the true intent of heating the leftovers up for
lunch the next day. By the late 1950s, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the idea
of taking food home was becoming a bit déclassé. After all, the war was over,
the economy was booming—if you needed to take home food, it must be for the
dog.
Has anything changed
between the generations? Are we motivated in the same way to take food home?
Because of the Depression,
our parents’ generation faced real hunger. As the Greatest Generation became more
prosperous, they remembered the empty stomachs of the past and were hell-bent
on never wasting food…or most anything else. Their Boomer kids called it “The
Depression Mentality.”
It
went further than taking home a leftover nibble. It also meant parsimony across
the board. For example, my aunt made all of my mother’s
clothes during the Depression. This carried over to her making my Halloween
costumes and hemming my skirts. To this day, I wish I could afford a tailor of
that quality. As that
generation fades away, their thrifty habits have resulted in a transfer of
wealth in the billions to Boomers. Yes, we had a laugh at Aunt Annie. Now we
spend her savings on our trip to Machu Pichu.
Yet here it is 2020,
and like my mother before me, I, too, take food home from restaurants. To me,
the doggie bag remains one of the last nods to conservative spending, to the
afront of waste…a beacon of material sanity.
I used to delude
myself into thinking that I would eat the food in my doggie bag. But after
three weeks of neglect, it would turn so green that I couldn’t consider putting
it in my mouth. If you tend to travel weeks on end, don’t bother to take
anything home for later. There is no later, except if you want to run a research
lab that needs moldy petri dishes.
But still, I take
food from restaurants. I leave the bag on the street near the dumpsters and
along the buildings where I know the homeless frequent. I feel good…but do I?
I am aware that doggie bags Boomer-style are a bit, well, self-indulgent. The only reason I need a doggie bag is that today’s portions are just too big. When did restaurants get the go-ahead from customers to offer ever larger, ever more calorie-loaded platters? Boomer consumers must have voiced the demand for gargantuan portions through some buying-habits research survey. Once the McDonald’s quarter-pounder came on the market, there was no turning back. Comedic folksinger Allan Sherman, said it for us in song—“Do not make a stingy sandwich, pile the height of the cold cuts high. Customers should see salami coming through the rye.”
My friend’s pastrami sandwich
at Junior’s restaurant in Brooklyn could feed the entire cast of The Lion
King, let alone little Skippy the racoon from New Jersey.
But while the doggie
bag may serve to hide our gluttonous shame, Boomers are now wracked with environmental
concerns over the doggie bag.
The Green Restaurant
Association has more than 100 member establishments in 20 states. The association worries about the
effect of the doggie bag on the planet and support biodegradability.
In his thoughtful article, “Doggie Bag Dilemma,” Dan Oko tells us that, besides adding to our bloated landfills, doggie bags can cause cancer. “I’m surprised how long it took me to realize that restaurant doggie bags and to-go boxes pose a serious problem. Moreover, the fix calls for more than just recyclable foil swans. Most to-go waste finds its way into landfills, and energy hawks worry about the cost of producing and disposing of paper-based containers, such as pizza boxes, while other concerned citizens fret over the carcinogenic fallout from chlorine and polystyrene, a petroleum-derived material commonly encountered in Styrofoam containers.”
Oy vey. This is
terrible! All this prevention of waste is costing us more.
Maybe instead of
taking restaurant food to the dogs, we should take the dogs to the restaurants.
Indeed, many restaurants are now meeting dog lovers’ demands for Fido-friendly
meals. Shake Shack’s Woof Menu offers a Bag O’ Bones—five dog biscuits—which
will set you back $7.50…and Pooch-ini, biscuits with peanut butter sauce and vanilla
custard, ominously warning us, “this is not for small dogs.” The menu is silent
about raccoons.
In Berlin’s
restaurant, Treats for Pets, the menu is just for dogs. People are not served,
except for a cup of coffee. Furry dinner companions mingle with their colleagues
and acquaintances from the dog park to catch up on local gossip. I wonder if
the dogs request a
biodegradable Boomer bag for their leftovers. Aunt Annie would have loved that.
What About Skippy? Skippy really is a
racoon. And my friend really does get joy in feeding him. “I know it’s wrong. But I love
to see him happy,” she told me. Here is a quote from her e-mail to me…
Skippy
came at 4:00 am for a Junior’s leftover orgy in the incarnation of a
racoon. All caught on our new Christmas present from the kids—a deck camera. Then
he became two, but his second self had to be satisfied with leftover bird seed.
There’s a moral here somewhere.
I thought the racoon emoji
at the end of the e-mail was a nice Boomer touch.