Man serves his kids food from the trash, wife says, 'this is bad parenting.'
When this man is concerned about his kids, he asks Reddit:
'AITA for serving my family food from the trash?'
For context, my sister and I grew up relatively poor. When I was 6 our mom took a promotion and moved three hours away.
We found out in our adult life, she had been hoarding her money and giving our alcoholic father a small allowance to raise us. With his addiction problems, it left us minimal money for essentials.
By the time I was 16, we were technically on our own and was ransacking dumpsters to feed myself and my sister.
I’m now in my late 30s, have a successful career and live quite comfortably, my sister is also well off now. My wife and I have a great relationship, I’ve worked to stop some of my old habits from my upbringing.
Some of my penny pinching techniques, my wife graciously ignores and let’s me save our money where I can. However, there’s one issue we always can’t find a compromise.
I can’t handle when food is thrown out. Our daughter (12) wanted chickens last year. That ended up being a good idea, since our table scraps would go to them instead of being wasted to the trash.
For the record, I hate when my wife shops are Costco. She buys too much for our family which creates a lot of waste.
I’ve asked her to at least donate what we don’t eat, or give it to me and I can drop it off to a homeless camp near my job. She promised to just buy less quantity, but that didn’t last because she doesn’t like grocery shopping more than once a week.
Last week I came home and found a sealed pack of lettuce, one whole cucumber, an entire loaf of bread, and potatoes in the trash can outside. The lettuce was expired, but looked fine. The bread was also expired, but had no mold.
The potatoes had eyes, but weren’t green or rotten yet. I went inside and started on dinner. I grilled chicken, which was the only item not from the trash. I made a salad and added the cucumber, used the bread to make croutons. And finally, I made mashed potatoes.
We all sat down to eat, my wife mentioned how great the food was. I told her it was what she had thrown out earlier that day.
She was completely mortified and grossed out. I told her I washed everything off before cooking it, but she said that didn’t matter. My point was, if the food was good enough for us to eat it should have not been thrown out.
At bare minimum, she could have given it to our daughter to take to the chickens. She argued back, that I should have taken it from the trash and to the chickens, not to our table.
She was irritated with me, fearing we all would have food poisoning or something. But none of us got sick from the food.
She said regardless, it was wrong for me to prove a point in that manner and borderline abuse to serve the family food from the trash.
I don’t really see what I did wrong, there are starving people in this world and for us to throw out perfectly fine food just doesn’t sit right with me. AITA?
Let's find out.
mist93 writes:
YTA You need to find ways for you to heal from your childhood trauma without digging food out of the trash. Just because you were okay this time doesn’t mean that wasn’t a bad decision, especially feeding it to your family without their consent.
bendbrewer writes:
ESH. We basically make everything we can from scratch. I enjoy cooking and we’re on a budget, so it’s the easiest, healthiest and cheapest way for us to eat and we make good stuff.
We try and limit our shopping to one big run every other weekend, with the occasional stop by the store once or twice during the week (which we wouldn’t need to do if we actually planned a little bit better).
We rarely rarely, rarely throw food out. If we do, it’s because I made a bigger batch than I should have and we didn’t want to eat the same meal 4 days in a row lol we also buy a lot in bulk, but stuff that we can save easily (a vacuum sealer is a lifesaver if you want to limit waste and still shop effectively).
That being said, I would never take food out of the dumpster to eat. Hard to say AH because you don’t seem to be malicious, but definitely askew.
Your wife is understandably upset, but that shouldn’t surprise you considering you fed your family food from a dumpster without telling them to be snarky.
roughelik76 writes:
YTA for how you’re approaching the subject and the unresolved trauma.
If you don’t want food waste, you land your wife need to sit down and meal plan.
And if she doesn’t want to grocery shop more than once a week, why can’t you shop once a week as well?
You’re putting the onus of your pet peeve onto her, instead of proactively avoiding it yourself.