My mother’s side of the family is all Greek (my maternal grandparents were a Greek immigrant and a first generation American whose parents were both Greek immigrants). From that side of the family I inherited the idea that it is a sin to waste food. (Well, that it is especially sinful, since all waste is, technically speaking, imperfect and in that sense sinful.) Part of this is that Greece has always been poor; as someone put it—I don’t know who—there’s little in Greece besides goats, olives, rocks, and philosophy. However, I’ve been coming to learn that it’s not just that.

Greece had been oppressed by Turkey for hundreds of years, which certainly did nothing to make food plentiful. Then the first World War made food scarce throughout Europe because war is always destructive, and of food in particular it is destructive in a variety of ways. Then there was the Great Depression and the various food scarcities that that introduced. So the idea that food is very precious and never to be wasted certainly came from somewhere.

But that’s the thing—I know where it came from. My Greek relatives thought it terrible to waste food because food was scarce and it was important to eat every Calorie you could because you might have to rely on them for days, weeks, or more. During the second World War, starvation was a real problem in Greece. One German administrator (the Nazis had conquered Greece during WW2) famously wired his superiors in Germany, “send wheat or coffins.”

Starvation is not a problem in modern America. Apart from the way that obesity is the major health concern of our times, this was really brought home to me by an African grad student I knew when I was in grad school, who asked me the simple question: “what’s the longest you ever went without eating involuntarily?” I had never considered the question before and was shocked that my best guess was six hours, perhaps eight. (This was radically different from his own experience in Africa, despite being the son of a chief, if not the first son and not of the chief’s first wife.)

This is not to say that food cannot become scarce in America. Disasters can happen. Times can change. But we live in the times in which we live, not in times that may come. And while it can be wise to prepare for bad times, it’s not really practical to lay in five+ decades worth of multi-decade-shelf-life food stores and in any event that’s not the food we buy to eat on a daily basis, anyway.

(There is also no point in bringing up places which don’t have the abundance of food that America does, because their main problem is not the inability to grow food but poor logistics (roads, economic & political stability, etc.) which means we can’t, realistically, ship them our excess food no matter what we do.)

In our current environment and for the foreseeable future, we can grow quite a bit more food than we can eat. And what’s more, we should. In an uncertain world it would be madness to try to grow exactly the amount of food that people will eat. That would mean that anything going wrong, anywhere, would result in people starving. We absolutely should aim to grow more food than we can eat so that even when things go wrong—and they certainly will—we still have plenty of food. Which means that the only open question is whether we waste that food at the individual level or whether we are individually efficient and waste the food as part of government programs where we pay people to collect the uneaten food and destroy it (once it’s too old to be eaten). Between those two, the former is more efficient, especially at the edges of individual uncertainty, such as suddenly needing more food or mice getting into one’s pantry and needing to lean more heavily on the food in the fridge.

Despite all that, I still find it very hard to throw out food. A part of me really wants to hoard it and let it choke up my shelves until I finally get around to using it—even though I’ve no interest in eating it anymore and it is probably six months past tasting good. That would certainly make sense if the Turks or the Germans were making starvation a reality, but in America , right now, that does no one any good, and does everyone who lives here very minor harm (it’s harder to find the things that people do want because the shelves are too clogged).

It’s curious how this sort of thing works. Sometimes it’s very hard to accept what one knows to be true.

(These thoughts were occasioned by me developing the willpower to actually throw a bunch of stuff out and clean out a bunch of the shelves, so don’t fear for me. I’m in no danger of being crushed by seven foot tall piles of stuff.)