One of the somewhat delightful things I’ve learned as an adult is - you can just ask people for anything, and they’ll do it, much more often than you might think.
I remember the time I was at the Ocha on Embarcadero in downtown SF and I saw some older VC type guy order his shrimp pad thai with no tails.
My mind was blown and my life changed forever. Now I order french onion soup without the onions (high end steakhouses are happy to strain it), shrimp tempura rolls with no tails, whatever. I order my salmon nigiri with no skin. I’ll order sides of sauces from other menu items I didn’t get.
It’s rare they don’t accommodate me. (Before you ask, I always tip super well and don’t ever mind an upcharge for a special side sauce or whatever.)
You are paying them! I still struggle with customizations and usually like to try things as envisioned by the chef, but some food textures I just can't do.
Unless it's a place with a certain vision/theme/morals or artsy food, they just want to make you happy.
As a Dane from central Copenhagen, I'm not sure where you'd get that idea from.
While most would agree that fresh food tastes better (unless it's pizza, that jury is out on that one), that doesn't mean we're too posh for the looks of leftovers. A good portion of our food is also quite boring, and the most common takeaway comes pretty crudely presented and packaged. If we only ate food in fancy presentation, we'd all have starved to death by now.
The reason I don't eat half-eaten meals is because I never half-eat meals in the first place. I order the amount of food I want to/can eat, and should that plan fail, I share with my tablemate(s) - although I tend to be the recipient on that one. We don't do it because we fear taking a crime-scene with us home in the form of a haphazardly filled styrofoam box like poor people, but just because it seems polite and proper to both size your mail right and try finish it. That, and that we didn't know that taking it with us home was even an option in the first place.
I used to drink a lot of pop/soda. When I initially cut back I stopped buying two liters for the house and only drank when eating out or the like. It always shocked my table mates to see me asking for a to-go cup for my drink.
But now I see those same people getting their drinks to go too, especially after the lockdowns and everywhere was offering curbside drinks.
Yes it is. Asking your waiter to wrap up the rest of your food to go almost never happens in the UK.
Maybe this is creeping in due to seeing Americans doing this in movies. You start to realise how people cope with those huge portions sizes in the US. Many people don't eat everything in one sitting.
It's hard to explain why we don't do it in the UK. We generally assume that packaging is not free so therefore wouldn't expect someone to give free takeaway boxes. Also, like almost everything cultural in the UK, I expect it is rooted in class snobbery. If you need to take away, maybe this indicates that you're poor and need to make a meal last. These aren't conscious prejudices, they're relics of the past and subconscious.
As italian, this kills me, what if there’s leftover? The restaurant just throws it away? Food? For class snobbery? Like the restaurant can’t reuse it, no? So it’s just thrown away?
Indeed - this goes along with other cultural values of clearing your plate and not wasting food. Some pubs offer "senior" portions for adults who don't eat much.
It is definitely rare, but not completely unheard of; more common if you're in a sitdown place that also does takeaway/delivery. I've done it a few times. One memorable incident was in Bradford where we arrived late at a curry house after interminable faffing around, were all extremely hungry, ordered more than we usually would, and halfway through the starters and giant naan realized that we'd overdone it. Think we got more than one meal out of the leftovers.
What's your point? That there might sometimes be leftovers even if you plan to finish it? So what? People also take left overs home and sometimes never eat them. It could very well be the case that places that don't send home boxed leftovers result in less overall waste than places that do. Especially when you consider the boxes sent home as well.
No system is perfect and a culture of taking home leftovers does not necessarily reduce waste overall.
> No system is perfect and a culture of taking home leftovers does not necessarily reduce waste overall.
Well not being able to take home leftovers does increase waste, because as others have pointed out there will always be cases where you will have leftovers, no matter how careful you are.
I’ll explain why this is not necessarily true. If you are able to take home leftovers, there is less incentive not to end up with leftovers. Hence the amount of leftovers should _increase_ as a whole. Some of those leftovers will be left in the restaurant by customer choice (resulting in waste) and some will be taken home. Some of the food taken home will not be eaten which then also will become waste.
So the question as to which system results in less waste boils down to a question that must be answered experimentally.
Reducing waste on a societal level is complex. Cultural practices of restaurants boxing food to take away may result in less waste but it may also result in more waste.
> If you are able to take home leftovers, there is less incentive not to end up with leftovers
I feel that having leftovers is never desiderable, with or without the ability to take them home. In France the restaurants are obligated to allow you to take leftovers home, and in my experience this has not changed anything on the behavior of people eating in restaurants. The only thing that changes is that in the rare case in which you have leftovers, you can take them home.
Restaurants are sometimes OK with splitting a dish in two/half if you ask nicely. Sometimes I do this for lunch when I'm not very hungry, and can't remember a single time someone said no.
If anything, it shows us that life is short, and can end at any moment, and maybe we shouldn't fill it with non-problems, like calculating the size of the food we order in order to don't have to take it away .-.
You're not going to eat re-heated food that you've had at the restaurant a few hours prior, no-one who cares about food ever does (unless you're an American, maybe).
Even if they're non-Americans, this is a verily heavily American-influenced forum so the people here most probably have more American habits compared to the average people in their countries.
> That's a bit universal for what's simply your opinion.
Yes, and that's a feature, not a bug, we're here to share our opinions, this is not a peer-reviewed forum.
With all that said, I still cannot understand how come a person who says he/she cares about food could eat re-heated takeaway stuff (supposedly at the microwave, which makes it double yuck-y).
> Yes, and that's a feature, not a bug, we're here to share our opinions, this is not a peer-reviewed forum
If it’s your opinion, you may want to introduce it with "Personally, I would never …" instead of writing "no-one who cares about food ever does", which is obviously false.
> With all that said, I still cannot understand how come a person who says he/she cares about food could eat re-heated takeaway stuff (supposedly at the microwave, which makes it double yuck-y).
There are other ways to re-heat food, you can mix with other things, you can also eat it cold if that’s your thing. It’s also not just about caring about food, it’s also caring about money: when you eat your leftovers, you don’t have to pay for new food.
> "Asking your waiter to wrap up the rest of your food to go almost never happens in the UK."
It happens, I've done it. Certainly at pizza restaurants and such where we've over-ordered. It's easy to chuck half a pizza or whatever in a takeaway box, and they're always happy to do so.
It's just less common in the UK because meals generally aren't so oversized like they can be in the US. In the UK we usually order what we can eat. If there's food left on my plate, it's because it didn't taste good and I don't want it.
The meals aren’t actually oversized in the US, they are serving you 2 or 3 meals when you order. Nobody expects you to eat all of that food in one sitting. Many restaurants even place the to-go containers on your table without asking because it’s culturally ingrained.
No it’s not - we’ve done this many times in London in all sorts of places, chains, small restaurants and even a very fancy restaurant (the waiters there looked positively happy when we asked).
We don’t do it often only because we don’t over-order as a general rule (c.f. my wife’s Chinese family in Canada who over-order every time we go out and take whatever is left home).
> It's hard to explain why we don't do it in the UK
I wonder if you're assuming I'm not from the UK, I am. I've seen it regularly, across strata. You are not speaking for the entire nation.
Clearly (judging by the mixed comments where some say it's not common, and some say it is) this is a regional thing, but the assumption being made in that thread, and your comment, is untrue.
The wasteful step is to order more food than you will eat. Someone not finishing their meal is what I don't recognise. If someone has a small appetite I am used to them enquiring about portion size and arranging to split dishes with others rather than expect to bag up an excess. There are always people keen to get their hands on anything going spare anyway.
I only see it happen if someone falls ill, is called away or there was an error in the order e.g. you manage to order four entire chickens instead of four portions.
But why is it wasteful if you intend to eat a portion of your dinner for tomorrow’s lunch? All the food is eventually eaten.
Is it because a small paper box is involved? Would you find it less obscene if everyone carried a reusable food container with them to a restaurant to mitigate the risk of offensive boxed leftovers?
This whole discussion feels like "why would you need debuggers, you should not introduce bugs anyway". Even if you are careful you will eventually end up in a situation with leftovers; it may be your fault, but it may also be the restaurant’s fault.
Not really, because different people are different. Some may not have the capacity to eat fewer large portions - like me - and eat less, more frequently.
Many people eat more than they need to at any given time, that is arguably greedy and argubably wasteful in a different way.
Portion sizes are static, appetites vary, letting people manage for themselves is perfectly fine.
> It's hard to explain why we don't do it in the UK
Due to various factors, we can't afford to make more food for that price. So we charge the same (or more) for less food on the plate compared to other countries.
> Also, like almost everything cultural in the UK, I expect it is rooted in class snobbery. If you need to take away, maybe this indicates that you're poor and need to make a meal last. These aren't conscious prejudices, they're relics of the past and subconscious.
This is just you having a hammer and everything looking like a nail. If you're shamefully poor, you're not eating out at all. Cheap takeaway food like fish and chips is definitely not shameful, and people of all socioeconomic classes eat it.
Also this anecdote is from 2006, nearly twenty years ago. It definitely wasn't popular then and now is only likely in certain types of establishment (probably places that do deliveries).
> You start to realise how people cope with those huge portions sizes in the US. Many people don't eat everything in one sitting.
Yep. It conflicts with the "clean your plate!" mentality many kids were brought up with, but realizing that a meal you buy is often really enough for two meals and that it's OK to take some back with you can help both your weight and your wallet.
I do it -- 'please put that meat in a container for me' -- and have for a couple of decades. But then I rarely can afford to go out and most places provide normal portions you finish in one sitting.
I do it all the time, mainly to keep for the dog. I was asked this week at a pizza place if I wanted to take the rest home too. I don't think it's as uncommon as you think.
In Germany, particularly in Hesse from what I've experienced, restaurant staff might take offense if you eat less than half of your meal and refuse to have the leftovers packed up. Just last week, a restaurant in Gießen went above and beyond by including an extra bowl of fruit salad alongside the remainder of our meal. That, I will remember a long time, especially after my wife's startling reaction to discovering a kiwi in the package – she's terrified of the fruit for some reason :)
I can confirm that. The cultural attitude in Germany is that food should not be wasted. One of my favourite café bars in Heidelberg, when it closes, gives away the unsold pastries to the people who are still there -- sometimes a whole bag full.
There are still a lot of Germans around who remember not having enough to eat as children in the late 40s. Yes, their parents had done, or at least allowed, terrible things, but they were children. Meat was especially in short supply, and my 85 year old aunt-in-law is pretty sure they had rat a few times.
So my elderly German in-laws would be horrified with how casually my Texan ones will buy and grill large, expensive slabs of beef, and end up throwing out a good deal of it because it was way more than the bunch could eat. I am, anyway, but have learned to bite my tongue.
Can confirm, my parents grew up starving in the ashes of WW2. My mother hid canned food under her bed, in her closets, everywhere for all of her life. It always annoyed me and when I'd ask her about it she always answered the same, "I hope you never know what it's like to starve".
A few years ago my family went to a pub / Thai restaurant, and the portions were larger than we were expecting. I asked the owner if he could put the leftover food in a box for me to take away; he said, "Sorry, I can't do that -- what if you took it home and then got sick?" I knew that they also did take-away; so I countered, "Could you give me a box and then forget about it?" He smiled and got me some take-away boxes, then left so he wouldn't see what I did with them.
So, it was sufficiently unusual that I had to be creative to make it happen.
It is. Go somewhere like South Africa where you expect with most meals to have a takeaway box, as there's so much food. We might do it, especially if we have kids with us, but it's not something after basically every meal.
> I’ve only ever seen it done in pizza places that already have takeaway boxes available.
Most, if not all, restaurants have something they can drop leftovers into if you ask for it.
As someone who lives in Spain but is Swedish, I've never had any restaurant tell me "we don't have takeaway boxes" or "no, we won't do that" when asking to take my leftovers with me, neither in Spain or Sweden or any other country I've visited.
So now we have covered PostgreSQL and food waste, how about the topic of avoiding small aircraft for transportation (because they are so much more risky compared to larger commercial aircraft)?
This isn't true at all.