As italian, this kills me, what if there’s leftover? The restaurant just throws it away? Food? For class snobbery? Like the restaurant can’t reuse it, no? So it’s just thrown away?
Indeed - this goes along with other cultural values of clearing your plate and not wasting food. Some pubs offer "senior" portions for adults who don't eat much.
It is definitely rare, but not completely unheard of; more common if you're in a sitdown place that also does takeaway/delivery. I've done it a few times. One memorable incident was in Bradford where we arrived late at a curry house after interminable faffing around, were all extremely hungry, ordered more than we usually would, and halfway through the starters and giant naan realized that we'd overdone it. Think we got more than one meal out of the leftovers.
What's your point? That there might sometimes be leftovers even if you plan to finish it? So what? People also take left overs home and sometimes never eat them. It could very well be the case that places that don't send home boxed leftovers result in less overall waste than places that do. Especially when you consider the boxes sent home as well.
No system is perfect and a culture of taking home leftovers does not necessarily reduce waste overall.
> No system is perfect and a culture of taking home leftovers does not necessarily reduce waste overall.
Well not being able to take home leftovers does increase waste, because as others have pointed out there will always be cases where you will have leftovers, no matter how careful you are.
I’ll explain why this is not necessarily true. If you are able to take home leftovers, there is less incentive not to end up with leftovers. Hence the amount of leftovers should _increase_ as a whole. Some of those leftovers will be left in the restaurant by customer choice (resulting in waste) and some will be taken home. Some of the food taken home will not be eaten which then also will become waste.
So the question as to which system results in less waste boils down to a question that must be answered experimentally.
Reducing waste on a societal level is complex. Cultural practices of restaurants boxing food to take away may result in less waste but it may also result in more waste.
> If you are able to take home leftovers, there is less incentive not to end up with leftovers
I feel that having leftovers is never desiderable, with or without the ability to take them home. In France the restaurants are obligated to allow you to take leftovers home, and in my experience this has not changed anything on the behavior of people eating in restaurants. The only thing that changes is that in the rare case in which you have leftovers, you can take them home.
Restaurants are sometimes OK with splitting a dish in two/half if you ask nicely. Sometimes I do this for lunch when I'm not very hungry, and can't remember a single time someone said no.
If anything, it shows us that life is short, and can end at any moment, and maybe we shouldn't fill it with non-problems, like calculating the size of the food we order in order to don't have to take it away .-.
You're not going to eat re-heated food that you've had at the restaurant a few hours prior, no-one who cares about food ever does (unless you're an American, maybe).
Even if they're non-Americans, this is a verily heavily American-influenced forum so the people here most probably have more American habits compared to the average people in their countries.
> That's a bit universal for what's simply your opinion.
Yes, and that's a feature, not a bug, we're here to share our opinions, this is not a peer-reviewed forum.
With all that said, I still cannot understand how come a person who says he/she cares about food could eat re-heated takeaway stuff (supposedly at the microwave, which makes it double yuck-y).
> Yes, and that's a feature, not a bug, we're here to share our opinions, this is not a peer-reviewed forum
If it’s your opinion, you may want to introduce it with "Personally, I would never …" instead of writing "no-one who cares about food ever does", which is obviously false.
> With all that said, I still cannot understand how come a person who says he/she cares about food could eat re-heated takeaway stuff (supposedly at the microwave, which makes it double yuck-y).
There are other ways to re-heat food, you can mix with other things, you can also eat it cold if that’s your thing. It’s also not just about caring about food, it’s also caring about money: when you eat your leftovers, you don’t have to pay for new food.