The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

426 chapter 40people of whatever income routinely put their once-used teabag in a littledish set out for the purpose of using the bag a second time. Some even reusetheir coffee grounds. The bourgeois mother of another Dutch friend washesout the plastic bags she has used and hangs them out to dry.The kaasschaaf, the cheese parer, for slicing very thin slices off the blockof cheese, is picked up by Americans as a novelty as they leave Schiphol airport.But they don’t use it once they get home. Instead they go on as beforecutting off whole big chunks to eat. It would scandalize a Dutch housewife.In truth, hard cheese does taste better when pared, so the paring could beexplained as rational in a cheese-eating nation. But there are less easilyevaded cases. All Dutch kitchens are supplied with a utensil for scraping outthe last little bit of yoghurt or spaghetti sauce from a jar. It is called by theDutch a flessenkrabber, a bottle-scraper, consisting of a tiny rounded rubberedge attached to a foot-long plastic handle. Dutch people cannot believethat other nations don’t have it—well, except for New Englanders of an earliergeneration, among perhaps a few others, which makes again the pointof its strangeness in a rich world. Even poor Dutch people could get alongwithout the fraction-of-a-cent’s worth of sauce sacrificed if the unscrapedbottle were thrown into the trash—no, I’m sorry: into the recycling bin.And the Netherlands has been one of the richest countries in the world forcenturies.People scrape not out of Prudence Only, not for P values, but becausethat is what a Dutch person should do, S-style, like scrubbing the frontstoop, or skating the Eleven-Town Tour when the canals in Friesland ice up.It is a “sacrifice,” literally “making sacred,” the S-holy deed of paying homageto one’s Dutchness. And that is what the Dutch say when you laugh attheir flessenkrabbers. They retort that food is God’s gift, and it is thereforesinful to waste it. Or in a more socialist vein they say that to waste it is toinsult the labor that went into producing it. Or, such theologies aside, theydeclare that they were raised anyway as Dutch people to do so. Their identityis sacred.To most Americans the cheese paring and sauce scraping and tea-bagsaving seems miserly and therefore ridiculous. Americans go to lengthsof achieving “convenience,” in packaging cheese for example, that strikethe Dutch as crazy, imprudent, highly un-zuinig. Let’s see: how aboutpre-cutting the cheese so that you don’t have to bother cutting your ownchunks, then packaging them together with the crackers, so you don’t even