Delving into the doggy bag
This post was inspired by a reader named ‘Scott’, who left some fascinating comments on doggy bags at the end of my post on tipping. Scott: I don’t know if you’re a random poster or a regular reader but this one’s for you!
Oh, and in case you prefer the dulcet tones of a high-pitched Australian voice to actually reading the post, you can listen to an audio version if you prefer (I’m experimenting; this may be a one-off – I’ve discovered that footnotes and audio don’t mix well!).
When my sister comes to stay with me in London, if we go out to a restaurant for a big meal, she has no compunction about asking for a container for leftovers – a.k.a. a ‘doggy bag’. I’m always slightly envious when she does this, because it’s not something I feel comfortable doing myself – although I actively participated in the custom when I lived in both the US and Canada, where my sister currently resides. I did request a doggy bag once or twice when I first moved to London, but quickly realised that the practice wasn’t common here, so stopped doing it based on the premise that ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’.1
As readers are likely aware, the concept of the doggy bag is American in origin. Certainly, the USA is the country where the practice is most widespread, although it’s commonplace in neighbouring Canada too. As the BBC reports, ‘Doggy bags are part and parcel of eating out in the US’. In contrast, ‘In the UK, it is a rarely heard request’.
Surveys by the UK Sustainable Restaurant Association and Zero Waste Scotland suggest that the reluctance to ask for doggy bags in Great Britain lies primarily in embarrassment: respondents report being too self-conscious to ask for a container to take home leftovers. However, while North Americans might have few qualms about asking for takeaway containers today, this wasn’t historically the case – as the name ‘doggy bag’ itself attests.
According to reports in the Smithsonian Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer, the modern doggy bag was introduced in the 1940s, with restaurants encouraging diners to take home leftover meat. Although called ‘doggy bags’, the food they contained was never intended for Trixie or Fido. As Jane and Michael Stern report in The Lexicon of Real American Food, ‘There is seldom pretense that the uneaten porterhouse will wind up in doggy’s dish’. Instead, the concept arose as an explicit means of counteracting the embarrassment of asking for a container to take away the remnants of an uneaten meal.
Although origin stories abound, Stern and Stern attribute the rise of the doggy bag to Dan Stampler, the proprietor of the Steak Joint in New York. According to their account, he introduced the practice at his restaurant in 1946 to enable budget-conscious customers to take away leftovers without feeling embarrassed about it, ‘thus implying that those who left the restaurant with a bag of food were kind-hearted animal lovers rather than omnivorous steak gluttons’.
While the practice quickly took off, it was treated as lacking in decorum amongst middle-class Americans for decades following its introduction. According to Jan Whitaker’s Restauranting Through History blog, etiquette columns in newspapers regularly received letters during the 1970s asking if it was okay for restaurant patrons to request a doggy bag if they didn’t actually own a dog.
Emily Post,2 the American doyenne of manners, was initially firmly against the practice. In a startlingly literal interpretation of doggy bags, she wrote in a 1968 column, ‘I do not approve of taking left-over food such as pieces of meat home from restaurants… Restaurants provide “doggy bags” for bones to be taken to pets, and generally the bags should be restricted to that use’. However, by 1975 she had revised her position, on account of the increase in portion sizes and attendant concerns about food wastage, stating that it was acceptable to take leftover meat to consume at home – unless it’s ‘been slopping around in gravy’.
While Americans were ultimately able to overcome their reticence about taking home leftovers by veiling the act in euphemism, the practice hasn’t taken off in the same way in most Anglo-European countries – much to the dismay of environmentalists concerned about food wastage. However, my suspicion is that while embarrassment is part of the story of why doggy bags remain a novelty in many countries, other factors are also at work. After all, it’s probably not a coincidence that doggy bags arose in the country universally known for its mind-boggling large portion sizes at restaurants.3 But clearly functionalist explanations alone don’t account for the distinctive American embrace of doggy bags when dining out.
Broken down, there are four interconnected elements to going to a restaurant. First, it involves a financial transaction: you exchange money for a meal. Second, you’re paying for a service as much as a product. Third, there’s a host-guest element to the experience. Fourth, meal preparation is considered to be an art form as well as a domestic science, with entire genres of TV shows and books devoted to the distinction. Now, while visiting any restaurant involves all four elements, their prominence clearly differs from locale to locale. This speaks to the difference between ‘eating out’ and ‘dining’: you dine at a fancy French restaurant; you eat out at Wagamama.
When a transactional approach dominates, a focus on value for money and quantity over quality is the natural result. Conversely, when an experiential approach dominates, the focus is on ‘atmosphere’, ‘sumptuous presentation’, ‘silky taste’ and other terms beloved by food critics.4 Arguably, the doggy bag has more of a place in the former context than the latter. As Scott observes, if dining is perceived primarily as a financial transaction, you are more likely to think of leftovers as something you have purchased and are entitled to take with you (you’re also more likely to have leftovers in the first place5).
Obviously, there is a class dimension to the distinction between eating out and dining. If you haven’t got money to spare, you’re unlikely to want to waste it on an overpriced meal of minuscule proportions served by snooty waitstaff. But there is arguably a cultural dimension as well insofar as the transactional model of dining is unquestionably more prominent in the US than, say, France.
However, there are limits to this model. For instance, the doggy bag might be quintessentially American, but good luck asking for one within the premises of another quintessentially American dining innovation: the all-you-can-eat buffet. This isn’t to say that you can’t sneak food out of a buffet, as ample numbers of TikTok videos attest, but the operative word is ‘sneak’: expect severe social censure if you’re caught.
This is because eating is never just eating: the act universally has complex social and cultural meanings, including explicitly moral ones. In Anglo-European contexts, a whole category of deadly sin is devoted to it: gluttony. The problem is that profligacy is also a sin. While it might not be quite as immortally ‘deadly’ as gluttony, wastefulness is something Judeo-Christian value systems strongly counsel against. For children, this generally manifests in being admonished to eat everything on your plate because someone, somewhere is going without: for children of the 1980s, this was, of course, the ‘starving children in Africa’.6
The problem with doggy bags is that they are simultaneously a symbol of gluttony and profligacy – as a group of Italian environmental economists recently found out. Convinced that the ‘shame’ (their word) of asking for a doggy bag at restaurants was primarily due to the fear of looking poor, they conducted a study consisting of two field experiments at a number of eateries in Italy. At one set of restaurants, they placed a message on tables telling diners that doggy bags were increasingly common in restaurants, and they were happy to provide one if requested. At another set of restaurants, they simply informed customers that wait staff would provide a doggy bag for any leftovers and to let their waiter know if they didn’t want one.
The researchers expected that both strategies would increase the number of people taking home doggy bags, with the default option having the greatest impact. But to their surprise, only the first approach had a statistically significant effect on doggy bag usage amongst customers. Contrary to their expectations, when diners were informed that any uneaten food would be boxed up and given to them as a matter of course, this reduced their willingness to leave any food on their plate. In other words, telling people a doggy bag would be provided if they didn’t eat their whole meal seemed to pressure them into consuming the entire thing.
Personally, I think this response was entirely predictable, but perhaps it was less self-evident to a group of behavioural economists who assumed that the reticence in using doggy bags could be overcome by simply providing them. In the end, the researchers were forced to acknowledge that in trying to reduce the stigma of asking for a doggy bag, they might have inadvertently drawn negative attention to uneaten food. In their words, ‘by informing customers that any unconsumed food would be boxed and delivered at the end of the meal, the default message may implicitly suggest that in those restaurants, leaving food uneaten is considered inappropriate behavior’.
Of course, it’s not that they inadvertently created this association, but rather that they drew attention to the pre-existing negative connotations of leaving food on one’s plate. Uneaten leftovers might be wasteful, but they’re also potentially insulting7 – especially outside of transactional dining contexts. This is because you’re not merely a customer, you’re a guest. Moreover, you’re dining with a host who has pretensions (well, one hopes) of having mastered the art of cooking.
In this context, as hundreds of episodes of Come Dine With Me attest, leaving food on your plate is basically conveying the message that you did not like the meal – something most of us feel uncomfortable doing, unless the food is particularly unpalatable. Moreover, in the event that a meal is bad enough that you do leave remnants on your plate, you’re certainly not going to want them placed in a doggy bag so you can relive the experience at home!
Arguably, the less transactional the restaurant, the greater the concern about giving offence becomes – a tendency illustrated to entertaining effect in the Mr Bean episode where he visits a fancy French restaurant on his birthday and makes the mistake of ordering steak tartare. Disgusted by the taste, he pretends that he is enjoying his meal whilst simultaneously trying to hide bits of steak tartare wherever he can: in the sugar bowl, under his plate, inside a bread roll, in a woman’s handbag.
In this context, where the properties of food as sustenance can’t be disentangled from its symbolic meanings, and where the transactional aspects of dining compete with its other attributes, is it any wonder that the doggy bag hasn’t caught on? The truth of the matter is that while it might look like a bag, people see it as a trap that leaves you caught between the proverbial rock and hard place. If you don’t eat your dinner, you’re wasteful; if you want to take it away with you, you’re greedy. In effect, the doggy bag simultaneously symbolises both waste and greed.
Even in the US, it had to be introduced by the back door (or, rather, the pet door) to counteract these symbolic meanings. The problem is that the jig is up: the rest of the world knows very well that doggy bags aren’t about actual dogs, so it’s no surprise that British and European environmentalists haven’t got very far in their bid to introduce them.
Still, if the history of the doggy bag has shown us one thing, it’s the power of branding to shift cultural norms. So the next time I’m out at a restaurant, can’t finish my meal, and my sister isn’t around to request a doggy bag, I’ve decided to look the server in the eye and ask, without qualm or equivocation, for a container for my leftovers – except, of course, I’ll be calling it a ‘saving the planet pack’.
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Which is slightly ironic, because the practice of taking away leftovers is frequently attributed to the Romans.
Well, in point of fact the column was written by her granddaughter-in-law, Elizabeth, as Emily was long dead by then. Still, the Posts, like the estate of author Virginia Andrews (she of the tawdry eighties’ classic Flowers in the Attic*), weren’t going to let a little thing like death get in the way of making a buck. Emily Post’s great-great granddaughter, Lizzie Post, has since taken over the mantle.
*‘Deranged swill’, the Washington Post called it. Naturally, with my lowbrow taste in books, I have read it, the novel being intensely popular amongst teenage girls in the 1980s.
I will never forget going to a tapas restaurant in Fort Collins with my mum when I was living in Colorado and she was visiting from Australia. Based on the presumption that the plates of tapas would be their usual diminutive size, we ordered four or five. To our shock, dinner-size plates full of food came out.
The levels of pretentious wankery amongst food critics have few parallels – sommeliers being their only genuine competition. Despite the authority conferred on food critics, I’m generally of the Gordon Ramsay school of thought when it comes to their value. Your testicles, if you happen to possess a literal pair, may well be more reliable tastebuds – although one intrepid reporter who tested the gastronomical qualities of his gonads with sugar water, orange juice and soya sauce is dubious.
On my birthday, I once ate at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Ireland – the same one I have written about in my post on laughter, where the sommelier’s description of the wine sent me into hysterics. Although the meal contained nine courses, the portions were so small that we contemplated stopping off for fish and chips afterwards.
Although this expression is often treated as irredeemably racist, it is actually an intergenerational admonishment whose target changes depending on the culturally stereotyped object of pity at the time. While my generation was raised on pictures of starving Ethiopian children, baby boomers were told to think of the starving children in India or China and their parents were frequently exhorted to think of the starving children in Armenia. That said, given that these examples are countries rather than continents, there is undoubtedly an essentialising African stereotype at work in the eighties’ version of the refrain. Still, it’s probably worth noting that people also report being told as children to ‘Think of the starving children in Europe’ – although having been complimented on numerous occasions on my grasp of English while living in the US,* I assume this was a specifically American variant.
*I’m guessing this is because people often confused Austria with Australia, but that may be giving them too much credit, given that when my husband was completing fieldwork in the US in a motor home, he was asked more than once whether he drove it from Australia. This begs the question: where on earth do Americans think Australia actually is? (There’s basically an entire genre of Australian comedy** dedicated to taking the piss out of Americans’ grasp of geography.)
**This is also a well established genre of Canadian comedy.
I should hasten to note that I am only speaking of their Anglo-European meanings. For example, in South Korea, norms around leftovers differ. This is partly due to the communal nature of most dishes, where you serve yourself only what you want. In my experience, if you are given an individual dish (like soup) and eat the entire thing, that is a signal to the host that they haven’t given you enough food and should serve you more. Basically, it’s best to leave a little in your bowl. I learned this the hard way when given what I believe was anemone soup (it came from the sea; that’s all I know). The most revolting dish I’ve ever eaten, I forced myself to consume the entire thing out of fear of insulting my host – I resorted to swallowing the anemones whole in a bid to get them down. Utterly nauseous by the end of the dish and exhausted by the pretence that I was enjoying it, I was promptly served more.