Why Are We So Wasteful?

Tell me that this series of events hasn’t happened to you before. You walk into a restaurant and find out that there is a forty minute wait, which creates your first grudge against the business for the night. Once you are seated, the waiter takes forever to fill up your empty water glass and ask for your orders, since he seemingly disappeared from the restaurant. After eating your meal, which felt like it took five hours to come, you wait some more to receive your bill. Lastly, you face the decision of how much your waiter deserves for a tip, so you review your entire night at the restaurant. In the end, you come to the conclusion that the service was slightly slow and eventually decide an appropriate amount.

I’m definitely guilty of performing these actions, as well as the majority of our society. While some customers are polite and appreciative, others endlessly complain about their food being cold, not having enough ketchup, or the fact that the restaurant is too loud for their liking. Thinking from a broad perspective, the difficulties that our society faces in a restaurant are meaningless and essentially stupid. We complain about having to wait for less than an hour for our food to be brought out, while billions of people throughout the world go days without any nourishment. Once the orders are brought to the table, people who were once “starving” are unable to finish their meal and allow the leftovers to be thrown away. This is the one of the most wasteful habits because a large portion of society could benefit from that waste. 

Eighner displays the life of a person in poverty throughout his piece “On Dumpster Diving.” He demonstrates how the lower-class has a much broader perspective on what food is acceptable to eat, by including how he willingly eats “cheese with a spot of mold” since he can “just pare [it] off” (424). This situation portrays a simple example of how those in poverty are satisfied by their ability to find expired food, and thus allows the upper-class to become more guilty of our irrelevant complaints regarding the extravagant food that we are able to receive. The billions of people in poverty would be absolutely astonished if they were able to receive just one meal a day, which is why those who aren't in poverty need to develop a deeper understanding of the fact that they are extremely lucky to be able to receive whatever food they like whenever they desire.