Like so many of you out there, we here at stopreproducing.com spent last Thursday with our loved ones celebrating Thanksgiving. For our non-American readers, Thanksgiving is a holiday where you gather with friends and family to sit around table completely covered in food and give thanks for all of your blessings*. Most Americans give thanks for all of their blessings by eating too much food and spending the rest of the night talking about how stuffed they are. Granted, eating massive amounts of food for the sheer sake of gluttony is not something we support here at stopreproducing.com, but that is not what really hit us about that day. Inspiration for this post struck while we were helping to clean up. While placing all of the leftover turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes in Tupperware containers and in the fridge to eat over the next couple of days, we realized that saving all of this food was an anomaly for most people. The other 364 days of the year most leftovers in the United States go right in the trash. This is something that we have noticed in the past, and whenever we asked someone throwing away perfectly good food after a meal why they did not just keep it for later the response was invariably Well… I just don’t really eat leftovers. Well… we just don’t think you should have any kids.
It is bad enough that we already eat enough food to make us the fattest nation on Earth, but we have to add insult to injury by wasting even more food, because we don’t feel like eating it after it’s been re-heated. Imagine the awkwardness of some over-weight couple trying to explain to a starving African family their decision to throw out the rest of their Chicken Carbonara and Fettucini Alfredo at the Cheesecake Factory because they needed to save room for the Chocolate Tower Truffle Cake and do not really enjoy pasta when it has to be nuked. That family would stare at that couple like they had two heads each (for a grand total of eight chins). The idea of “leftovers” themselves would probably be hard enough to grasp, let alone the decision to willfully throw them away.
According to a 1995 survey conducted by the Economic Research Service/U.S. Department of Agriculture, over 90 million pounds of edible food were wasted in foodservice and consumer food loss, which was 26% of the total edible food supply. Food losses at restaurants are exacerbated by the trend towards "upsizing" the portions that customers are served. As restaurants put more and more food on our plate we not only eat more and get even fatter, but we end up wasting more food as well.
This sort of willful wasting is not in the best interest of the species. The level of selfishness needed that would allow you to throw away perfectly good food because you “do not like leftovers” while there are millions of starving people, not only in the world but in our own streets, is not a trait that we wish to see passed down to future generations. We understand that eating your leftovers is not going to completely solve the world’s food crises, but it at least shows that you are conscious of the problem, that you realize that there are those that are starving. Until you can show this bare minimum of consideration for the rest of your species we must ask that you please stop reproducing, there are already plenty of mouths to feed.
*Unless of course you are a Native American, in which case I am sure it is a bitter reminder of how a group of foreigners took advantage of the fact that you did not understand the concept of property law and stole your land and decimated your population.
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