Now kids, don’t make pigs of yourselves

How we form our values

BY ELAINE KLAASSEN

There was a famous church leader who was going to be in Hillsboro, Kansas, the Mennonite town where I grew up, and friends of my parents had invited him to dinner. They invited our family, too.

My mother let us know ahead of time that he had a reputation for being a good steward of resources, not wasteful, and concerned that everyone in the world should have enough. If he used a little less, then there would be enough for everyone, or something like that. Years later the bumper sticker started to appear: “Live simply so that others may simply live.”

The way my mother explained his convictions to us was to say that he didn’t eat very much, and while I think that deep down she respected his discipline, she made it sound like it was really odd to pick at your food. Like, where did he get such a crazy idea?

She said it in a funny way, kind of like he had three heads, implementing the condescending humor which marked our Germanic culture (then again, Baudelaire said that all humor is condescending, so maybe it wasn’t just us … )
Nobody in our family was actually fat and we never pigged out or ate junk food or snacks, but we did love our food. We had three squares a day, all of which usually involved meat and dessert—as though we worked like farmers. Everything was homemade from the garden or the farm or some natural source and we ate leftovers until we were blue in the face.

Our friends, where the dinner was going to be, were one of the wealthiest families in town. I don’t think it was that they had so much money in the bank, but they lived in an opulent style, partly because they had money to spend on their surroundings, and partly because the mother was an artist. Everything she did was art. So her house was very beautiful, all the food she ever prepared was beautiful and her clothing was beautiful. I started to wonder if there was some sin in that. Of course now I don’t think so.

The church leader was very nice, very serious, and indeed, didn’t eat very much. I was careful, then, not to eat too much, either. We tried to be inconspicuous as we watched his every bite.

This Gandhi-like man, whose very presence (and reputation) in our midst made me think about global issues at an early age—I was about 12 or 13—impressed me with his credo, even though I didn’t hear it from him. I heard it through the grapevine. For all I know, he could have had a disease, or a medical condition, that squelched his appetite.