Waste Not, Want Not

Most Americans, at least of my generation, will probably recognize this phrase: "There are people starving in Africa." The geographic locale might change -- China, Ethiopia - but the meaning of the warning, which was uttered by mothers when we were growing up, was always the same. "Eat your peas/green beans/vegetables/food because it's morally wrong to waste it when people elsewhere might be dying for lack of your riches."

The Japanese have a much more compact way of giving the same warning. Japanese mothers simply say one word: "Mottanai."

The Japanese-English dictionary definition of mottanai is "wasteful," but the word carries much more clout than just the simple meaning. It implies a moral authority that says "it is weak and tragic to waste something this way - how could you?"

The Yomiuri Shimbun ran an editorial back in 2001 that addressed the concept of mottainai, and quoted several Japanese dictionaries, which better reflect the word's cultural context. Here's one: "A regrettable situation in which something is wasted without its value being fully utilized."

Like the author of the Yomiuri editorial, I heard the word often enough when I was a child that I learned to flinch whenever it was evoked. I heard mottainai in reference to wasting my food, breaking my toys, driving around aimlessly with my friends and wasting gas when I was a teenager, spending too much money on frivolous things (wasting money was a common theme for me) and even not pursuing as a career the subject I studied in college.

I used to think I must be a bad Japanese person, but the Yomiuri article made me feel a little better, sort of. It turns out there is a wave of mottainai-ness that has crept into Japanese society. A food recycling law went into effect that year because people have become painfully wasteful.

A survey by the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry found that about a quarter of the food served at wedding receptions is left on plates and thrown away, an unthinkable waste a generation or two ago.

According to the government study, the amount of food discarded at wedding receptions, at 23.9 percent, was the most wasteful, compared to 7.7 percent at households and 3.6 percent at restaurants. The new food recycling law requires food-processing and food-distribution companies, restaurants and other businesses that potentially discard excess food, to recycle at least 20 percent of food destined for garbage dumps.

I'm not sure what exactly a food recycling program does - will I be served a piece of someone else's wedding cake at a coffeeshop? Will homeless shelters (Japan these days does have a homeless problem) be serving leftover punch? It's one thing to eat leftovers, but do I want someone else's leftovers?

I have the mottainai mentality deeply imbedded in me.

Besides typical efforts such as recycling aluminum cans (it's hard to remember a time when people didn't recycle cans), I'm familiar with a slew of very Japanese and Japanese American regimens.

We save all bags, including paper bags but especially all plastic bags, such as grocery bags, produce bags and even bread bags, to use and re-use until they're ruined with holes. Cotton rice sacks are tough and perfect for re-use -- even as towels or clothing. The same goes for plastic tubs such as margarine and potato salad containers. Who needs Tupperware when there are Cool Whip tubs stacked under the sink? Plastic forks and spoons are saved for the next family picnic, and disposable chopsticks are not disposed of, but washed and used at home, or in gardens to hold up young plants. Towels are used until they are literally in tatters. Clothes are worn and handed down until they are threadbare, then used as rags around the house. Presents are very carefully opened so that wrapping paper can be re-used and the bows are put aside for the next Christmas.

And food is never wasted. Japanese Americans even have a dish called "okazu" which is a mish-mosh mixture of leftover meat and rice and vegetables, so that nothing is wasted from a meal. It's taken a week for Eri and I to clear out the "nokori," or leftovers, from both our Christmas and New Year's family meals.

To throw out week-old leftovers would be the ultimate in mottainai, as is the painful task of sweeping through the refrigerator and tossing out moldy bread, expired milk, wilted vegetables or crusted-over ice cream. Likewise, weeding through the pantry to throw away the months-old bags of stale, half-eaten chips and ancient boxes of cereal can be heart-rending.

It's not easy being a responsible, non-wasteful person.

But once in a while my "itazura" (mischievous) soul wells up within me, and I fantasize about replying to mothers who tell their kids to eat all their vegetables because there are starving people in the world.

I want to say, "OK, let's box it up and send it there." Maybe that's what the Japanese should do with their wedding leftovers.