Zin Craig Matthews, aka "Dr Ruthless" (Scot FM)

I was taken to a restaurant called the Cheesecake Factory. The portions arrived. I need to describe them carefully, because an American who grew up with them cannot see them anymore. My plate was the size of a hubcap. On it, a pile of pasta that could have served three men. Beside the pasta, bread, which had come earlier, also free, also in quantities I did not need. I had also ordered a salad, foolishly, assuming the salad was a small thing. The salad came in a bowl I would have used for washing rice. In my land, when you finish a meal, the plate is empty, and your gratitude lives in that emptiness. To leave food is to say the chef has failed, or the host has misread you, or you have insulted the farmer. It is a small shame, repeated millions of times, which has built eight hundred years of restraint. I ate until I could not continue. I had eaten perhaps a third of the plate. The waitress came. She looked at the plate. She did not look disappointed. She looked at me the way a nurse looks at a man who has refused a second blanket. She said, "Want me to box this up, hon?" Box it. Take it with me. Carry a stranger's uneaten food out of a public building, past other paying customers, into the night, and continue eating it later, on a different day, from a plastic container, probably cold. I said no, out of honor. She said, "You sure? There's a lot left." I said yes. I paid. I left. I thought about that food for the entire drive home. I thought about it while I brushed my teeth. I thought about it while I lay in bed. At two in the morning I thought about it so hard that I got out of bed, got in my car, drove back to the restaurant, and discovered, as I had feared, that it was closed. The next day I returned. I ordered the same dish. I ate a third of it again. When the waitress came I looked her in the eye and said, with all the dignity my ancestors had passed down to me: "Box it up, please." She said, "Attaboy, hon." I carried that box out of the restaurant like a newborn. I ate from it the next afternoon, standing at my kitchen counter, cold, directly from the container, with a fork. It was somehow better than it had been in the restaurant. It had rested. It had aged. It had become mine, in a way that food inside a restaurant never is. I now order knowing I will not finish. I plan tomorrow's lunch at tonight's dinner. I am told this is, in fact, how it is done. A nation that builds a restaurant where you can eat two meals, on two days, for one price, has solved a problem I did not know I had. I still have not eaten a cheesecake there. I keep forgetting.