Are You Gonna Eat That?

Whenever there is an event involving food, which is pretty much every event, at the end of it there is a scramble to pack up as many of the leftovers as possible.  This can include whole braised joint of pork, steamed fish, bowls of fried rice, tureens of tom yum goong, along with full and half-full bottles of water, whiskey, and sickeningly sweet soda. 

Two of the more recent examples of this were a fundraiser for the local volunteer traffic police and our school’s pre-New Year’s party.   At both of these events there was easily enough food for twice the numbers in attendance.  So at the end of the evening, when the performances by scantily clad women (or transvestites, as the case may be, this at the fundraiser) and karaoke singers (this at the school event, although it’s not outside the realm of possibility that these could be reversed) had become increasingly intermittent and lethargic, like the diminishing pops of microwave popcorn, the plastic bags came out of pockets and purses and the entire contents of platters, tureens, and other serving ware were deposited into them with an alacrity and efficiency that defied belief, especially given that these qualities are not much in the forefront of many Thai events. 

(At the former event, the amount of food left over was greatly contributed to by the fact that our school had reserved two tables of 8 persons each, and only 5 of us total went.  Exactly how and why this transpired as it did is another whole story, which I will not go into here.  But I will point out that at events such as these each table is served the amount of food that would feed its maximum capacity rather than the actual number of people sitting at it.  In our case, 4 of us sat at one table, leaving one unfortunate teacher to take one for the team and sit alone so that we could ensure getting both tables’ full and ample share of food.  Why he ended up sitting alone rather than at least one of us joining him is another complicated matter that I will save for another post.)

This stands in rather stark contrast to the standard practice of tossing out perfectly good food at the end of any given everyday meal, which I witness on a nightly basis at dinner with my neighbors.  At the end of the meal, the remains of soups, curries, raw vegetables, dipping sauces, etc. will be emptied into plastic bags and promptly deposited in the nearest trash bin.

At first I thought that this was due to heightened concerns about spoilage given the climate, but then realized that my neighbor has a refrigerator (although granted, it is only slightly larger than dorm-sized).  I then thought that perhaps it was because food is so inexpensive here that it wasn’t really seen as wasteful.  (You can go to any small restaurant and get dinner for about a dollar or two.  Local open-air markets also sell already prepared foods for the same or even less.)  This could in fact be part of the reason, but I suspect that the other, larger part has to do with two other prominent aspects of Thai culture: 1) obsession with food (I know that there are many cultures that are food obsessed, but among these there is still a range, and I think Thailand must be near the top), and 2) obsession with surface appearance (ditto).  This means that if something is not absolutely fresh looking, smelling, and tasting (fermented fish notwithstanding), it is considered spoiled. 

So, how this squares with the aforementioned scavenging, I’m not entirely sure. My only guess is that the drive to get something for free trumps even the predilection for the pristine.