Not long ago, one of my sisters got married. My parents were very involved in the wedding preparations, which is how we ended up in what my family now refers to as “The Cookie Situation.”
“You need to come see this,” one of my siblings told me as the reception wrapped up. “You won’t believe me unless you see it for yourself.”
We walked to the venue’s kitchen area, where nearly 20 large boxes of massive frosted cookies sat unopened and untouched. “There must be hundreds of cookies here,” this sister said before launching into a triage to try to figure out what to do with all the leftover food.
We later did the calculation. My sweet parents had ordered enough cookies for each anticipated guest to have half a dozen. “I don’t know why we thought that was an appropriate amount,” my mother said, shaking her head. “I don’t know why we ordered so many.”
I knew why.
My mother, like her parents before her, and their parents before them, back to Mormon pioneer days, were raised this way. The same way I was raised — to feed. To overfeed. We were brought up to prepare food not for what will be, but for what could be. To embody the physical manifestation of Jesus’ miracle with the loaves and fishes. To call upon our most gluttonously animalistic impulses conceived during Mormonism’s inaugural breaths.
To descend from Mormonism is to fear running out of food more than to fear waste.
When my mother became aware of The Cookie Situation, she grabbed one of the boxes and trudged out to the street, begging strangers to take them. “Please,” I heard her beseech a passerby. “We have too many cookies, and we just don’t know what to do.”
The next morning my husband drove his Subaru around the valley dropping off the remaining unsolicited boxes at shelters and children’s hospitals. When he returned home, he shook his head. “I will never understand this part of your family.”
Small bowl, big plans
He has tried to train these same impulses out of me but in the nine years I’ve known him, he hasn’t made any progress.
“Now remember,” he said to me last July as I started preparing a potato salad for a four-person picnic, “a very small bowl will be more than sufficient.”
“Right,” I sincerely told him, determined to self-moderate.
The moment he left the kitchen I experienced a possession not even the most seasoned exorcist could have restrained. The spirits of my ancestors entered my body and used my hands to peel 20 pounds of potatoes and boil a dozen eggs. I have not even a whiff of a memory of any of this. I remember only the outcome.
“I don’t know what happened,” I told my husband as we stood over our two largest bowls, each heaped with enough bland potato salad to feed 20 families at a potluck in a Pleasant Grove meetinghouse.
He sighed.
I know I’ve always been this way, but I don’t think I understood there was something wrong with me until I visited my husband’s family in Washington for the first time and attended a dinner at his sister’s house.
“How is such an offering meant to feed this many people?” I whispered to my husband as his sister pulled from the oven a sparse roasting pan of 12 asparagus spears and presented them to the 15 people in attendance.
“May the Lord sustain us in the coming months after suffering this season’s destitute harvest,” I mumbled in despair upon surveying the platter of five divided chicken breasts. (Note: I implicitly start speaking like a 19th-century God-fearing farmer down on his luck whenever I worry there isn’t going to be enough food at any given event.)
“Not everyone will want asparagus, so this was an appropriate amount to make,” my husband explained, as though conservative predictions about realistic food consumption should be a routine part of planning meals.
The family members sat around the table, politely portioning out reasonable amounts of the various dishes until none was left. They ate. They then stood up and cleaned the empty modest receptacles. No waste. No leftovers. I believe leftovers were never anticipated. I don’t think this kitchen even had a Tupperware drawer filled with empty Cool Whip containers from the ‘90s.
So few people, so much pizza
There must be a reason so many of us in Utah know only how to cook for 20. Maybe it’s because, unlike many other families, ours haven’t historically chugged wine with dinner, so we turned to an overindulgence in food as our vice of choice. Maybe this behavior is the result of residual cultural trauma from our ancestors’ brutal pioneer treks across the Plains. Maybe there’s a little genetic part of us that still thinks we all belong to large polygamous families. Maybe it’s a dash of all those things.
But even if genetics can contribute, I did recently learn environmental factors may be just as culpable a cause in some.
A few months ago, my husband and I hosted a small neighborhood gathering in our backyard. He ordered a number of large pizzas from a place down the street and assigned me to get them as he put the final touches on the several gallons of sangria he had just made a mess in our kitchen preparing.
When I gave the establishment my husband’s name, the workers directed me to eight large pizza boxes, each with 10 slices. “Are you sure you have the right order?” I asked, doing basic math in my head and determining this would be enough pizza for nearly each attendee to have a box.
The order was confirmed, and I returned home with the 80 slices of pizza to feed our 10 neighbors.
At night’s end, my husband and I stood over six untouched boxes of leftover pizza and six wine bottles’ worth of sangria. “I don’t know why I thought this was an appropriate amount of food,” my husband said, in disbelief. “I don’t even remember ordering or making this much.”
I put my arm around him, squeezed his shoulder and whispered, “Welcome to Zion.”
He looked at me, wide-eyed and concerned as I whispered again, smiling and staring at him like a hypnotic predator who finally captured its prey.
“We’ve been waiting for you to join us.”
Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. You can find Eli on Twitter at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother.
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