Immigrant parents often told their kids to finish their food; however, in this generation, it goes beyond the plate to reduce food waste.

I’m eternally grateful for the time and place that I live in. I am fortunate I am not in my parents’ position, that they took the brunt of the hardship when they immigrated to Canada so that I can thrive and optimize on the opportunities they didn’t have. I want to preserve my parents’ resourcefulness not because I need to survive but because I want my great-grandchildren to survive.

Identifying and appreciating this difference between our generations has allowed me to embrace my past, take action in my present to create a better future for my children. So I started thinking about all the resourceful ways I have lived my life and came up with a list of things I do to reduce wasted food. By sharing my story and tips, I hope to inspire you to redirect your focus away from “finish your plate” to “save our planet.”

So I’m going to share with you the things that I do to help reduce wasted food. I’m not someone who gives advice unless I’ve followed it. I’m a realist so these are practical tips that are relatively easy to follow and implement in your life.

Immigrant parents often told their kids to finish their food; however, in this generation, it goes beyond the plate to reduce food waste.

Canadian statistics on wasted food 

According to the Second Harvest’s 2019 annual report: Feeding People, Not Landfills, more than half the food that is produced gets thrown out in Canada. This is approximately 35.5 million metric tonnes of food every year. And 11.2 million metric tonnes of it can be avoided. 

Why should we care about wasted food? Why should we do our part in reducing it?

I’m going to state the obvious but it SAVES YOU MONEY! Like my parents, grandparents and great grandparents and ancestors have preached for generations, when you throw out something you bought with money, that is throwing out money. 

Next, let’s talk about the earth’s resources that are used to grow food. When you throw out half your burger, do you know how much it took to raise that cow, manufacture that it into ground beef, transport it to a restaurant, grill it and serve it to you piping hot? I’m just talking about the patty. When you leave it on your plate, it takes additional resources to collect, haul and transport to the landfill site. 

Lastly, the landfill that keeps growing also keeps producing methane emissions, contributing to the greenhouse gases that continue to heat our planet up.

Immigrant parents often told their kids to finish their food; however, in this generation, it goes beyond the plate to reduce food waste.

My “waste not, want not” upbringing

Growing up with Asian immigrant parents, my dad’s paycheque went to 2 things: the mortgage and the groceries. My mom’s paycheque went to our clothes and extracurricular activities. And anything extra went to their savings so they could put an additional payment into the mortgage at the end of the year. Survival was the priority; food and shelter were the main concerns as parents. Money was tight and throwing away food was like throwing away cash. That was their mentality.

My mom would often preach to us that we needed to finish our food, guilt-tripping us with the “starving kids in Africa who have less than us” story. Later on, when we were teenagers, she preyed on our vanity and self-consciousness by coming up with a myth that for every grain of rice we didn’t finish, a freckle would appear on our faces. 

Every dinner, she put a lot of thought and effort into her dishes, coming up with exciting flavours and textures with the ingredients she had in her pantry so that it would be enticing enough for her kids to eat. So when she would see food left in our bowls, she’d feel hurt, assuming we didn’t like her food and that we didn’t appreciate her hard work. Food was tied to how she showed her love and despite her good intentions, it manifested into my emotional eating, wanting to finish my plate whenever dinner was served as to not disappoint her.

Asian culture and the age hierarchy

Growing up as a Chinese Canadian, I often felt like I was a living and breathing war, caught in an eternal conflict between the Western and Eastern cultures. 

Which values do I resonate with? 

Which beliefs do I want to own? 

How do I want to define my identity? Is this a choice for me to make? Or my parents? Or my teachers? Or society?

In Asian cultures, age is significantly valued in a hierarchical manner. For instance, in Chinese culture, how family members are referred to depends on whether the person is older/younger than you. This determines their formal title.

Generally, the older someone is, the more respect they are entitled to and this philosophy is shared across Asia, from Korea, Japan to China as it is based on Confucian teachings. Everyone has a position in life, ranked depending on their age (old higher rank than young) and gender (males higher rank than females)* and how people interact with one another should reflect where they stand in this hierarchy.

Asian cultures value age in a hierarchical manner. I was taught to respect my elders. How has growing up in Canada affected my views?

The East and West battle inside of me

The other day, I was leaving the grocery store when I saw a white man in his late 60’s carrying a bunch of bags also head towards the exit. 

I politely asked him,

“Sir, would you like some help?”

He sneered,

“No thanks. I can do just fine. I’m not as old as you think I look.”

I’m shocked at his response so I don’t say anything. He walked on but I stopped to ponder, 

“What just happened?”

How that made me look even better

I’ve written about my past eating disorder, ongoing recovery and how it’s affected me as a mom. So this is about how I’ve changed my mindset around exercise, instead of abusing it, using it to heal from my abuse.

How did I finally figure out a balance that made me happier, healthier and look even better than when I was in my 20s before kids?

I’ve written about my past eating disorder, ongoing recovery and how it’s affected me as a mom. So this is about how I’ve changed my mindset around exercise, instead of abusing it, using it to heal from my abuse.

You can do too much of a good thing

It was around Grade 10 when I understood the concept of “calories in versus calories out”. It’s a simple math equation: 

The more you eat, the more you need to expend. The less you eat, the less you need to expend. 

The more you expend, the more you can eat. The less you expend, the less you can eat.

In order to lose weight, you can eat less and/or expend more. I wanted that thigh gap, those rail-thin arms, the flat stomach, to fit into size zero jeans, to tell people that I was an extra small when it came to buying clothes for me, to not get picked on for being the bigger girl at those Asian family dinners, to be praised for having lost weight etc.

So I took that equation and made up a dangerous game. Eating was tied to managing my emotions and exercising was tied to managing my mental state; I abused both, overexercising, starving and binging, consuming calories to fill a void, expending calories to expunge the guilt. 

Whenever I ate too much or ate something ‘bad’, I needed to cleanse my sins and exercise was my penance.

As the mother of a girl and a boy, I will get a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law. What kind of mother-in-law do I want to be? Hopefully, one that doesn't deserve to be punched in the face.

I have a daughter and a son. They’re both under 5 but assuming they’re both heterosexual and get happily married, I will have a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law. And I get to have the title of a mother-in-law.

Maybe it’s the old traditional mindset that girls will always come back to their parents whereas boys tend to stray away but I only started thinking about this relationship a little more in-depth when I had my son. 

I’m getting idealistic which goes against my realistic beliefs but aligns with my optimistic mindset. I want to think about this because, without hope and faith, there’s only doom and gloom. I don’t believe in hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. 

I prepare for the best because I believe the best will happen. However, if the worst happens, I have hope and confidence that the life experiences I will have had to that point will provide me with enough resilience to deal with it. 

I have about 30 or so years to prepare for the glorious day when I receive the mother-in-law title. 

Perhaps by that time, I will have changed my mind? 

Or the social landscape would have changed and polyamorous relationships have become mainstream; anyone can get married to more than one person and folks have multiple sets of in-laws. One big happy eh?

However, until then, here’s the kind of mother-in-law I want to be:

As the mother of a girl and a boy, I will get a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law. What kind of mother-in-law do I want to be? Hopefully, one that doesn't deserve to be punched in the face.

I have a daughter and a son. They’re both under 5 but assuming they’re both heterosexual and get happily married, I will have a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law. And I get to have the title of a mother-in-law.

Maybe it’s the old traditional mindset that girls will always come back to their parents whereas boys tend to stray away but I only started thinking about this relationship a little more in-depth when I had my son. 

Why is it more common for the relationship between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law to be strained than with her son-in-law?

Growing up, my mom discouraged my sisters and me from taking any medication unless prescribed and required by our family doctor. Anything else was unnatural and unnecessary for our bodies. Pain is part of life and riding it out was like a badge of honour for her. Like many Asian moms, she had mastered the art of hiding her emotions.

She will try everything to prevent disease before resorting to medication; hence, she eats incredibly healthy, works out like a beast, hikes, swims, practices yoga and destressing techniques.