The Ends-My Food Rule

I don't eat the ends of food.  This rule does not apply to all foods, however, only foods with conceivable ends.  For example, this rule does not apply to mashed potatoes, because the ends of the potato have already been mixed with middles so locating them would be next to impossible.  This rule does not apply to crust, because the crust follows a continuous trajectory around the edge of the bread and is arguably unending.  This rule also does not apply to piles of food, say a bag of chips.  Any chip could have ended up at the end, it just so happens that it is whatever so chip I chose.

It may help to clarify what foods this rule does, in fact, apply to.  Bananas, for example, are governed by this rule.  I will not eat the ends of a banana.  Unless of course it is all mashed up in say a smoothie, where the ends are impossible to tell.  I will not eat the ends of a sausage.  I do not eat most sausage anymore, so this application of the rule is not as important.  But it was important at one point.  I will not eat the ends of bread, or the heel as we may so call them.  And no, the heel does not mean the same thing as the crust.  Yes, the heel consists of crust, but the heel is also considered the end of a loaf of bread.  And so this rule applies.  And no. This rule does not apply to burritos.  But I could not explain to you why.

In fact, I could not even explain to you why it is I have this rule to begin with.  I did not even realize it a rule until I was a teenager, and noticed everyone else eating the ends of their foods.  Perhaps it was a way for child-me to take control over what I ate.  Perhaps child-me felt overwhelmed by the amount of food on child-me's plate and felt this was the only way to logically separate what I had to eat and what was okay to leave behind.  Perhaps child-me just wanted to piss off my parents.

Whatever the reason this food rule came to be, I find it even stranger that semi-adult-me is compelled to continue abiding by it.  Semi-adult-me is not as strict as child-me, but breaking the rule still stirs up a feeling of guilt.  Perhaps, in this world where the norm is not being able to control our food, this is a meager attempt at control.  Maybe it's just a remnant of child-me that allows me to reminisce to a time when food ends were my most dire concerns.

Unlike my other food rule - no red meat - this rule does not illicit much questioning from others at the dinner table.  A typical reaction to my distaste for ends results in giving them away to whoever wants them without objection.  After the gifting of the ends, the conversation is over.  For my other rule, however, there are always a couple more questions and not much gifting, maybe because it's harder to gift a whole entree.  I can guess why.  My second rule is more widely used, and so it has a social, moral, and environmental dimension.  It certainly did require more thought when deciding to abide by it.  But in the beginning, both rules derived from the same place - a desire to narrow my options in an infinitely optioned world.  So maybe I can explain the red meat rule a little easier, but what if that is only because it's been explained in so many versions before?  While these two rules may seem unrelated, I disagree.  They are both an answer to the overwhelming number of food choices that appear to us as variety.  Child-me just didn't know it at the time.