OVERABUNDANCE: too much!

We wanted to say "Thank You" to our hosts. Thanks for hospitality is something for which there is no real easy way to show gratitude. People have disrupted their lives, opened their privacy to invasion, and above all...have worked hard to make sure our comfort needs have been met. This was an exceptionally good experience for us; the sacrifices on our behalf have been visible.

To show our thanks we took the family out to dinner. We settled on a restaurant that our hosts had not frequented, but the reports were good. They turned out to be accurate. It was a fun place, filled with lots of appreciative customers, with a great bar, attractive surroundings, and filled with the smells of good food. Our noses didn't let us down. The food was excellent. Overall, it was a very successful evening...and the check was much less than we expected.

However...and this is a big however...the quantity of food served each of us was unbelievably excessive. We should have been suspicious when the appetizers came and they were the size of a small mountain. Great food, but way, way too much.

Then the entrees arrived and I began to look around to see who else would be joining us for dinner. My chicken parm could have fed three people. We all started laughing at the overabundance of food and the likelihood that Seamus, the family dog, was going to be the recipient of great "doggie boxes." In the end, the boxes we took back to the house were huge...enough meals for several days.

As we were packing the left-over food into the take home boxes, we commented that we wished we could ship it off to Haiti. It was not really as flippant a comment as you might expect. We in the group had some experience with poverty and disaster and knew that having this excess food from one meal was obscene when balanced against the needs of people in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. Of course the idea of sending it to Haiti was impossible, and served more as a comment than anything else. But there was a sense of guilt in all of our commentary.

Someone commented that Michelle Obama, who has just undertaken an initiative to address childhood obesity, would be horrified to think that someone might actually eat all the food that was served. The only children at the table were adult, professional children, but the point was not lost.

Opulence in a society takes many forms. Living into the overabundance of food without recognizing its destructive quality is one way in which opulence affects us with such ease. I'm not sure how we make that point without sounding sour and bitchy. Maybe a note in the mail to the management of the restaurant? A letter to the editor? A boycott of a great restaurant which may only need a comment to correct its practices?

The reality is that some people want that overabundance and may frequent that restaurant specifically because they want those "doggie boxes" at the end of the meal. I have to be careful about judgment. And this restaurant is not the focus of my comments. It is our society as a whole which lives into overabundance and the unhealthy, obscene results of it.

The bottom line about last night is that it was an enjoyable evening which, I believe, adequately expressed our thanks to the host family. We laughed at jokes, enjoyed the restaurant, and ended the evening with a feeling of well-being. My words this morning are just after-thoughts which needed to be spoken, probably to ease my guilt. Every good thing doesn't need a negative comment to balance it out. But it's hard these days not to be aware of the contrast between opulence and poverty.


Photo Credit:www.pdphoto.org/PictureDetail.php?mat=&pg=6924