Jesus Weeps
(Australia wastes 78 million tons of food per year)
Misquoting Shakespeare, one could argue that when we are born, we cry that we have come upon this stage of boundaries: societal, parental, environmental, on and on and on, including those we install ourselves. Some boundaries are temporary, others insurmountable. The topic reminded me of a woman who with a single sentence set up one such boundary. She was a Roman nun; I was a six, my first year in primary school.
Once a week a nun or a priest would come to take us for our religious instruction class. All that I was taught has been eminently forgotten. The only exception is this young nun telling us “Jesus weeps when you throw away good food”.
As an adult I can understand what prompted this obviously passionately held belief. The war, the German occupation of Rome and the food shortages, which ended only when the Americans entered Rome. My mother, a fabulous storyteller, used to regale me with stories of this unhinged period : descriptions of life in Berlin during the depression; her experiences as a teenager watching the rise of Nazism; life in Rome under fascism and later under German occupation, and once Germany was defeated, under an American one.
One story was of my grandmother buying bread on the black market. The seller was a German soldier. They were nearly caught, were it not for the quick wit of the soldier who enfolded my sixty-year-old grandmother in a passionate embrace. Prostitute? Lover? Whatever the commanding officer thought, if anything, it worked.
This message of not wasting food was reinforced by my normally overindulgent mother. One of her few strict rules was that you ate whatever was presented on your plate or go hungry. The going hungry however, was not an option if we were invited guests. In that situation you ate what was offered and suffered silently.
Two memories are attached to this stricture. When we arrived in Australia, my mother’s boss provided us with our first Australian meal: a Chinese take-away from a Heidelberg restaurant. This was weird cooking that I had never encountered in my nine years of eating. Politely, and not forgetting to say thank you, I heroically ate this unnatural, unpleasant concoction.
The second memory was entertaining a friend and her two sons for dinner. I can’t remember the dish involved, but it would not have been exotic. Her youngest looked at the dish and said “I don’t like that mum” To which mum replied “you don’t have to eat it darling”.
I was incensed. This is not how you bring up children. Not only is it rude, as my mother rightly taught me, but more importantly “Jesus weeps”.
I was six when I was given this “mantra”. Nearly seventy years later, I cannot throw food away and am still dismayed when I see it happen.
It’s a boundary, but a boundary I respect and for which I am grateful.
Delfina (Sept.2024)
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