There are many things that wind me up, and as I age I also seem to get increasingly opinionated and cantankerous.

The topic of this particular little expulsion of vitriol though, is something that bothered me for as long as I remember.

Saladpushers

Maybe it would be good to start by defining what I mean by the term.

I’m not talking about the people who try to use some kind of health guilt trip to make you order/eat a healthy salad instead of a juicy bloody steak served with potatoes drowning in butter (although they also bother me).

What I’m talking about is a certain section of the female population (this is not sexist, just observation) who go out to places where they could have the most fantastic food and order a ‘light’ or ‘healthy’ salad. They then don’t actually eat any of it except for one lettuce leaf, but spend the next half an hour using their cutlery to manoeuvre the rest of the food around the plate. They don’t choose the restaurant, they generally don’t pay for the meal, and they don’t enjoy it, so why are they there?

Now…

Healthy eating is good.

Sensible portion control is also good.

But…

The whole point of going out for a meal is for pleasure, it’s not about sustenance, it’s about enjoyment.

It might be lovely to have a very slim sexy girlfriend who never eats, but don’t take her out to dinner and waste the time and money. Instead, keep her at home, feed her salad leaves like an overgrown rabbit and spend the time that you would normally allocate to going out and enjoying a lovely meal to shagging like overgrown rabbits.

An insult to the kitchen

When you are going to a restaraunt, you should order something that you wouldn’t or couldn’t make at home. That could be because you don’t have the skill, or because you don’t have access to the range or quailty of ingredients, or because you don’t have the specific equipment needed to make a dish. Or, it could simply be because you don’t have the time.

You should order a dish that thought and care has gone into creating, and then, then you should eat it. You should savour every flavour and every texture, you should appreciate the quality of the produce, the thought that has gone into the development of the dish, and the skill and sweat of everyone in the kitchen that it has just come out of.

What you should not do is look at it, push it around your plate a bit, find a fake reason why you don’t like it and return it to the kitchen where the chef will immediately launch a huge inquisition into why the dish wasn’t good enough, and some poor commis will probably get a heap of shit for absolutely no reason at all.

An insult to the starving

Personally I’m quite often struck with a major moral dilemna. If I go somewhere to eat and the portion of food is larger than I would normally choose to eat, then what should I do?

I don’t want to eat too much for a couple of reasons.

Firstly I don’t like the physical feeling of being stuffed with food, it’s not comfortable, and why would I want to pay for sitting there feeling bloated and slightly sick.

Secondly I don’t want to gain weight and be fat. I know that I drink too much and the calories in wine are already expanding my waistline, and I don’t want to compound that expansion any more than I have to by eating food that I don’t really want.

On the other hand, I hate leaving food on the plate when there is nothing wrong with it. I’ve lived and worked in Africa and I’ve seen people literally starving to death. I find throwing food away, whether it is half a portion left on a plate, or even worse because you have bought more than you needed and it goes off in the fridge, highly offensive.

What might be a bit of greenery that you aren’t paying for to a saladpusher, is the difference between life and death to some people.

Is it just me?

No, it would appear not to be just me being all twitchy and moody.

Here’s another (female) point of view, that agrees with mine:

“I grew up in communism. I was never hungry but food was scarce to come by and was to be respected as it represented hours and hours of somebody’s time given to standing in a queue or standing over a stove in order to prepare that jam.

I live in capitalism and earn well enough to buy food in abundance or to simply go out when I do not feel like cooking.

But it does not change anything. I still revere food in all its forms. I cannot throw a slice of dry bread away without intense and uncomfortable feeling of being sinful. I hate seeing food being wasted. And that is where we are come to salad pushers.

When I was a student in the university I paid my bills by working as a waitress in a very nice restaurant. Had I not worked in this place I would never be able to afford to eat there. And guess who were quite often my clients?

Lovely girls, taken out by a smitten man who was willing to pay a hefty bill, who were wanting “just a little salad, but without any dressing, and some water without gas”… In the name of all what’s good, woman, if you hate the possibility of getting two grams fatter this much, do not agree to a date in a restaurant! You distress the chef, irritate your waitress and make your man think that you hate the date.

Next time, suggest the gym, hey?”