halves and halve nots
by lisa horak

My mother is a wonderful and amazing woman and I love her dearly. But she has one habit that drives me nuts: she tends to cut food up into several pieces.

Not pieces on her own plate, mind you, but pieces on the serving plate. So what, you ask? Let me explain.

Take a plate of cookies, for example, a perfectly ordinary dessert option. Before I can take the one that I want, she grabs a knife and cuts them in half—or worse, into smaller fractions. No one ever gets a whole one, which I realize is undoubtedly healthier all around, but still, to me, a third of a cookie feels just…well…incomplete.

I think that sharing food should be voluntary, not mandatory. I want to decide whether or not I want a whole cookie. Because what happens is that instead of feeling sated, I wind up feeling gypped.

Part of my mother’s rationale for fractioning (I think I made that word up, but you know what I mean, right?) the food is that smaller intake translates into fewer calories. My mother is a firm believer that crumbs have no calories. Consequently, it stands to reason then that since a quarter of a cookie is practically a crumb, it too can be eaten guilt-free. But we all know that it is not nearly so satisfying to eat just part of something. And studies have proven that one is far more likely to overeat if one feels deprived of what one truly wants.

Like the candy bars that sit in my parents’ pantry for months or even years, eaten one square broken off at a time. I don’t think my mother has ever eaten an entire candy bar in one sitting in her entire life! I think in her mind, such an act would send her straight to hell for all eternity.

Pizza is another interesting phenomenon. In our family we all stare at the Last Piece. Eventually my father (yes! He is in on it too!) cuts the Last Piece lengthwise down the center into two narrow triangles, and eats one of the two. My mother then bi-sects the remaining half slice, and takes half of that, and so on. You get the picture. Everyone is a martyr, not wanting to own up to their true appetite.

I realize that some food, like Chinese food, is definitely meant to be shared. Most of the time I have no problem ordering three or four dishes and sharing them all. But there is some pressure involved; namely you have to pick dishes that everyone likes. If I wanted something that no one else liked I would feel like a traitor, like I was letting the group down. By the same token, if I didn’t like everyone else’s choices and decided to order my very own meal, I would hoard my own General Tso’s chicken and not want to share with my kin. I tell you, it’s complex!

Incidentally, my mother has always had plenty of food in her home, both as a child and an adult. Her food divisions are not a result of necessity. She never had to divide one potato among 10 kids or anything like that. Rather, I think she just has a smorgasbord philosophy, (which incidentally carries over into the chic new world of tapas). By eating a little bit of many different foods you get the best of all possible worlds and not feel like you are missing out on anything. But I do not subscribe to this theory. It’s fine with me to exchange tastes of someone else’s meal, but it’s entirely different to have a meal made up of just tastes.

Before I paint too negative a picture of my mother, let me tell you the other way of looking at her tendency to divvy up the food. Two words—Loaves and Fishes (or would that be three words?) She is selfless and would deny herself her very favorite cookie on the plate if it meant that someone else would enjoy it more. My mother is generous beyond belief. We joke about how she quite literally tries to give me the shirt off her back. Whenever I complement something she is wearing, she offers it to me saying, “Would you like it? This is the first time I’m wearing it. Really, it would look much better on you.”

She volunteers at soup kitchens and food banks and organizes book sales to raise money for charity. She is a person who can make something out of nothing and who would give anything to anybody. Growing up, my friends were always welcome at our house for dinner, whether it was Thanksgiving or any other day. (A turkey, you’ll note, is by definition a carved up food!) Which reminds me of the holiday dinner a few years ago when the turkey caught on fire. It was a huge turkey, of course—enough for weeks of leftovers—and the pan was too small. Grease dripped into the flames of the gas oven, smoke began billowing out, and suddenly there was no meal. It wasn’t pretty, but fear not! Colonel Sanders came to the rescue, and we ate a bucket of Original Recipe Kentucky Friend Chicken for dinner. No one left my mother’s house hungry. It remained a festive meal, and certainly one that we remember fondly to this day.

And so I forgive my mother her tendency to halve. Through her constant generosity she proves beyond a doubt that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Lisa Horak is a freelance writer living in Asheville and full-time mom to Molly and Isabel, the toughest but cutest critics yet. She enjoys reading, hiking, and is a wannabe crafty person.