"You're Not Leaving This Table Until You Clean Up Your Plate! People are starving in China!"

That's what my mother kept telling me back in the depression years when I was a little girl. And she meant it! So I would sit there alone at her oval mahogany dining-room table staring at the two oysters floating in the cold and congealing milk that was ever more sickening to look at.

 Don't get me wrong, my mother was an excellent cook, always surprising us with new recipes. (Tongue in cheek and rolling eyes) No one could beat her spaghetti, or her roasts of chicken, beef, pork,  lamb chops. But there were a few things she made that I couldn't even look at, much less eat. Oyster stew was one, and cream of spinach soup was another. The funny thing was I loved oysters on the half shell, and I could eat them by the dozen with horseradish sauce mixed in mother's homemade chili sauce. And spinach was one of my favorite vegetables when boiled and eaten with a little vinegar on it. But I just hated the taste of cooked oysters, and spinach mashed in milk that resulted in a putrid green brew clearly was not edible.

I was not sure what my eating everything on my plate had to do with the starving people of China. I knew about them of course. I knew they were starving. We had delivery of the Sunday paper and listened to the news on our Philco radio. The Chinese were down to eating grass, and they were dying like flies. (But flies died on that sticky ribbon stuff, so that didn't make sense).

Even during the worst of the Depression we never went hungry on our farm, but I was a poor eater. I was never hungry at mealtimes. Breakfast was at 7 a.m., lunch at noon, and supper at 7 p.m. I was never hungry until about nine in the morning, and by then I was in school.  Mother forced me to eat breakfast anyway. I had to drink a little of orange juice, and eat some oatmeal, pancakes or eggs, with fried ham, bacon, sausage or home made scrapple. (Scrapple is the ground up leftover parts of a butchered pig boiled up with cornmeal, poured into loaf pans to set, then sliced and fried to eat). I liked bacon and scrapple, but not the rest of it. But she made me eat, and I would usually feel sick as I trudged off to school. I often up-chucked the whole lot as soon as I got out of sight around the first bend in the road. I stayed almost 20 pounds underweight until I was 13 and suddenly got hungry.

 Lunch was an unappetizing dry sandwich that was easily disposed of by the neighbor's dog as I walked home from school. Mother assumed the empty lunchbox meant I had eaten what was in it.

Supper came too late for me. I was hungry about 5 or even 6 p.m., but my appetite had given up by 7 o'clock. But on a farm, mealtimes are dictated by the work that has to be done, especially the milking of cows and getting in hay.

I had built a platform up in an apple tree not far from the house. It was especially nice when the apples were ripe. I could sit there peacefully eating apples. Often, when mother came out on the back porch to call me in for a meal, I would hunker down out of sight and not say a word. Her voice was strident. RUTHIE (her voice rose on the IE) she would bellow, loud enough to hear in the next county, and I just kept quiet, feeling every bit as guilty as I should have. But she soon caught on to that ruse, and I had to come down from my tree in the face of direct orders backed up by my father.

It was interesting, many years later in life, to see how my son and his lovely wife handled the same problem with their sons. They made kind and sensible suggestions to the boys, and the boys would eat a little more, but they were soon excused from the table with nobody upset about anything. I should have been so lucky! Both boys were skinny as rails when they were little, but WOW, you should see them now! I haven't seen them lately, but from their pictures they are great big strapping fellows.

To me food is sacred. I don't throw much food away (until it turns green and fuzzy in the refrigerator)  Instead I put it out for the birds, gophers, rabbits and coyotes to eat. Food is hard to come by for animals in these harsh dry desert mountains. Carrot tops, potato peelings, apple cores, stale bread, old lettuce leaves, and especially melon rinds, are food for some critter or other.

When I empty the garbage cans in this camp, I pick out the tortillas, bread, pancakes, or other foodstuff that I think critters will eat, and put it out where they will find it. There was a whole lot of cooked popcorn in one can yesterday, and I made sure to leave it where the crows would find it. I drove by later and saw crows flocking together making a big noise as they ate it. Crows are the culprits around here when it comes to scattering the contents of garbage cans far and wide. I used to blame it on coyotes until Carmen pointed out it was crows doing it. I'm not sure that all this non-traditional animal food is healthy for wild critters, but I'm hoping their instincts will guide them.

I never did figure out how my cleaning up my plate was going to help starving people in China, but it must have impressed me, because I can't stand to see food wasted. I frown in disapproval every time I see a food fight. I think of all the waste of food that should be available to eat, and the waste of the time and struggle to grow the watermelons that are tossed off balconies, and the waste of tomatoes splashed in tomato fights. I see no fun in wasting food.

I have never forgotten about the poor Chinese woman in the book "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck. Pearl Buck lived in China and knew what she wrote about. The woman and her family were starving, trying to stay alive by eating grass. She had other children, and in the middle of all the hardest of times, she had a baby that she smothered as soon as it was born. She did it because she knew she couldn't feed it, and she had to protect her other living children as best she could.

During the Great Depression of the thirties, I was only a child, but I was aware that a great proportion of the people in this country were going hungry, and a lot of people actually starved to death. Back then almost every one, except city dwellers, had gardens, and many had chickens and a cow as well. We were an agrarian society then. That is not so any more. With many millions more people to feed, and much of our food imported (even from China) we are very vulnerable in case a real emergency brought on by a depression. Our economy now is in a rapid decline, and I think it is time to make plans for survival in case of the real emergency that may be coming down the pike.