Opinion: Gordon Brown -- Is He Your Mother?

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Gordon Brown is telling Britons what mothers all over America tell their children, or at least they used to: clean your plate. There are children starving in [suffering nation du jour].

Your mother was right then, and she’s right now. And so is Brown.

Brown is already a dour character, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, the man in charge of the national piggy bank. It’s no surprise that he would put on the Jimmy Carter sweater-role, shake an admonitory finger and tell people to conserve, to save, to cut back and stop waste.

He may sound like an alarmist scold now, but he could wind up as a kind of Cassandra of consumption. In the United States, we waste grotesque, vulgar, unspeakable amounts of food. We don’t think we’re getting our money’s worth at a restaurant until the super-sized plate is piled up like Pike’s Peak. If we eat all that food, we aren’t doing ourselves any favors, and if we don’t eat it all, we aren’t doing the world any favors. In some restaurants, I see more food go back to the kitchen -- and presumably the garbage -- than gets eaten by diners.

The idea that an untouched bread loaf -- or one with just a single slice slice taken -- would be thrown out is so offensive that I’m pretty shameless about asking for doggie bags, not only for my own food, but for that of my fellow diners’. Sometimes I deliver it to a regular clutch of homeless folks near my office downtown; once in a while it reaches actual dogs, and other critters.

When I’ve asked for a doggie bag at restaurants in Britain, I get the eye-rolling ‘Oh, you Americans’’ treatment. Maybe that’ll change. I wonder whether an American presidential candidate -- or any ranking politician -- would have the gumption to ask the same here?

Virtuous as it is, the prime minister’s campaign against wasting food is a victim of unfortunate timing; he launched it en route to the G8 summit in Hokkaido, where he was served a gala eight-course banquet of 18 different dishes.

And I don’t think he asked for a doggie bag.