The Sunk Cost of Thanksgiving Leftovers
Is Waste a Sin?
Last Saturday morning, I found myself staring into the refrigerator at 2.5 leftover pies, a delicious collection of slightly picked-over pecan, pumpkin, and Dutch apple.
I love pie. Pie is good. But my wife and kids do not share my obsession, so the destiny of this post-Thanksgiving bounty lay solely in my hands.
Right behind me were a trash can and an in-sink disposal, either of which would have provided an appropriate resolution for these leftovers. After all, the holiday was done and it was time to resume normal nutritional practices, which do not include dessert after breakfast. But there’s dietary prudence, and there are the voices in my head.
“Throwing these away would be wasteful.” I thought. “And as we all know, waste is a sin!”
When you’re raised Catholic by Depression-era parents, you accept these kinds of concepts about money and doctrine as self-evident truths. There’s nothing more thoughtlessly wasteful—to say nothing of sinful—than throwing away food. Except masturbation.
The underlying fallacy of course comes from how we define “waste.” In this case, it’s helpful to remember the economic concept of sunk cost, i.e. an expense that has already been incurred, cannot be recovered, and thus should not be considered in evaluating future decisions.
Applied here, it means that the money exchanged for those pies is gone, so the only question to consider should be, “Is it a good idea to eat two and a half pies within a very short period of time?” In which case, one might consider other criteria, including both his undeniably expanding waistline and rapidly slowing metabolism.
As a parent, it’s hardly the first time I have faced this dilemma. When my kids were little, I would voluntarily consume expired Dora the Explorer yogurts and freezer-burned, gluten-free corndogs instead of tossing them in the garbage. One morning, I nibbled one of said corndogs while driving through the carpool line at my kids’ school. The teacher who opened the door for my then-kindergartners looked at me as if I was chugging a bottle of Jack Daniels. Dogs of corn, her judgy glare implied, should be eaten only by ex-convicts at state fairs and after 11:00 a.m. I smiled, pointed at the previously ice-speckled meat stick, and announced, “It’s gluten-free!” as if that explained anything.
What I was trying to say was that the kids won’t eat them, so I have to. This raises the logical question as to why the GF options were bought in the first place, given that no one in our house has a celiac allergy. We’ll address that rhetorical, passive-voice question some other time.
As my kids got older, the need to teach them food-based thrift intensified. When they were 9 and 10, we went with another family to one of those high-end steak houses where my 54-pound daughter ordered a $54 filet—a la carte, natch—and ate maybe 27% of it.
Having worked at several high-end restaurants in my early adulthood, I know that there is little chance the meat would have ended up in the trash. The “bus tub buffet” is a real thing that occurs in restaurant kitchens, augmenting the meager income of waiters, busboys, and dishwashers. Yes, I have eaten discarded treats off of strangers’ plates countless times. I know my daughter’s entree won’t be “wasted,” but that happens behind the scenes and I want my kids to see the connection between what they order and what they consume. So you bet your ass I had them box up that steak, along with the leftover sides of creamed spinach and onion rings.
This ethical stand comes at a cost. Not only do I occasionally embarrass my wife and our friends by walking out of a 5-star restaurant with a doggie bag. But because I cannot consider my kids’ half-eaten cheeseburgers, French dips, or fries as the sunk costs that they are, those morsels end up in my belly instead of in the compost where they belong. On one hand, I’m demonstrating financial accountability. On the other hand, I am carrying around an extra 12 pounds of belly fat—and God knows how much arterial plaque—to prove this point.
Maybe it’s the diluted blood of a famished Irish “green mouth” ancestor who died after eating grass or maybe it’s the combination of frugality and the fear of hell. But there’s a weird thought I have when I see a fully-stocked refrigerator. Instead of thinking, “We are so lucky to have all this,” I think, “Let’s finish that up before it spoils.”
Which brings me back to the pie. If there’s a sin here, it’s how much we bought in the first place, but that doesn’t occur to me as I evaluate my choices. Eating the apple was easy enough to justify. It’s apples, for God's sake! Since pecans have lots of protein, that’s good for muscles, and well, who doesn’t love pumpkin? It’s from a gourd, so it’s gotta be wholesome, right?
Fueled by hunger as much by virtue and these specious rationalizations, I devoured those pies. Okay, I did not eat all two-and-a-half—I scooped out some of the filling and threw away a good bit of crust. But conservatively speaking, I ate a solid 1.75 full-sized pies over the next 30 hours.
And I did it because it was the right thing to do.
THE END
(but keep reading…)
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That is all. I love you.
That is the truth!!! Though I would have sliced the pie into individual pieces, placed into sealed sandwich bags and froze.....just to eat it later. At this point, I am wondering, can one freeze Eggnog?