"Randy, will you eat? There are starving people in China"

but where are the egg rolls??!

Most moms do the ,"Starving children would be happy to have that" guilt inducing line.

The late comedian David Brenner did a bit on the topic. He said he always wondered if he ate his food, would some starving kid be happy and say, "Oh that's good. Thanks for eating."

I know he's demoted to dirtbag now, but Bill Cosby once said, in response to this attempt at shaming by his mother over food not eaten, "Okay, then put it in a box and mail it to them." I've still got that LP. Cosby is a sociopath who drugged women and had his way with their inert bodies, but he was still funny as hell in his prime.

I remember my mother playing that card, except it was the kids in Biafra, so this would be the late 1960s.

What she didn't get was that I was too young to understand the concept, and in any case I found most of what she made for dinner revolting in appearance, smell, texture and taste due to not only my as of yet underdeveloped palette, but her indifferent cooking. When I did try to visualize it, I saw starving kids refusing to eat this horrible food.

She wasn't totally at fault; her mother was even worse, and it was just a matter of a young busy housewife just trying to get something, anything, on the table.