I have grown up where we used to get the lecture from our parents of how it is so wrong to
and to respect food.Not put your feet on the table where food is kept. As I tell my kids the same thing, they look at me as if I have lost my brain..:cb:…but seriously, this article really made me stop and rethink and all the memories came back. We can be so wasteful especially here in the US where a regular dish is the size which can easily feed 2-3 people back home.
Please take a moment to make a difference too.
http://blog.dawn.com:91/dblog/2009/10/09/food-for-thought/
Some excerpts from the entry
I was shamed a few days ago, not once but twice. It began with my one-year-old daughter – with the gap teeth and sticky insistence – who wanted to eat herself. Before an embarrassing and ear-splitting tantrum could ensue, I plopped her on a chair and set a plate of pulao on the table.
Little Zainab, of course, has the table manners of cookie monster. Short of gruffly barking ‘cookies,’ she dipped her non-blue and non-furry paws into the plate and rammed fistfuls of rice in her mouth. Vast amounts of excess slipped down her strappy dress and stray grains lodged themselves in her pamper. She squelched it between her chubby fingers and flung some more on the floor.
I thought my job had been done. She was eating. She was enjoying herself. I looked at her indulgently and set towards my own lunch. God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. Except the man at the next table – heavy-set and bald – saw sin whereas I was smug in my mothering skills.
I believe there is a hadith in which the prophet says that rice should not be under the feet,’ he said, looking pointedly at the floor. If slasher movies replaced blood with rice, it would be a scene out of The Texas Rice Massacre.
I seethed. I stared. I gnashed my teeth at the cheek of the bald man. The thin bearded man sitting next to the Bald Self-Righteous One tried to diffuse the situation, mumbling something about another hadith.
While Zainab stuffed another few grains of rice up her nose, I mentally ticked off the reasons why I was ticked off. How dare he frame his reproach in religious terms (only in Pakistan can correcting bad behaviour always be a matter of faith rather than reason) and really, what business of his was it anyway? My very wise lunch companion calmed me down: ‘Remember where he is coming from.’