Willow Masquerade

Hufflepuff: A warm chai filled with sugar, milk and exotic spices to fill their sweet cravings. 

Slytherin: A steaming black tea with deep powerful flavor to compliment their perplexed nature.

Gryffindor: A hardy earl grey tea and a touch of milk to soften their audacious personality. 

volume IS very much a part of the american hospitality tradition, and Nobody Leaves Hungry is important. but you have to recognize that it’s not how we cook for ourselves, it’s how we welcome guests and strengthen community ties.

so in order to give you a celebratory experience and make you feel welcomed, family restaurants make the portions big enough that even if you’re a teenage boy celebrating a hard win on the basketball court, you’re still going to be comfortably full when you leave.

of course, that means that for your average person with a sit-down job, who ate a decent lunch that day, it’s twice as much as they want or more. that’s ok. as mentioned above, taking home leftovers is absolutely encouraged. that, too, is part of american hospitality tradition; it’s meant to invoke fond memories of grandma loading you down with covered dishes so you can have hearty celebration food all week. pot luck church basement get-togethers where the whole town makes sure everybody has enough. that sort of thing. it’s about sharing. it’s about celebrating Plenty.

Many restaurants have branded bags and boxes with the restaurant’s name on them.

When Americans eat crap, it’s often more about food deserts and a complete lack of reasonable public transportation than about our restaurants having insane portions.

A food desert is an area with no supermarkets or grocers where the only place that sells food is a convenience store with twinkies. It’s very common to not live within walking distance of a place that sells ingredients. In the suburbs, it’s normal to not only live outside of reasonable walking distance of food but also for that distance to be a huge highway with nowhere you’re legally allowed to walk. From conversations with friends, this sounds relatively uncommon in most countries. Every place has some farms in the middle of nowhere, but US style suburbs aren’t the norm.

Meanwhile, at least in some areas, we tend to have a lot of storage space, so it’s common to go to the supermarket only occasionally and stock up for the week/month with things that will keep. We’re not usually buying 800 servings at once because we’re actually going to eat all that right now.

The first thing I usually do when I get a burger is cut it down the middle and decide which half I’m going to eat, and which I’m going to save for a rainy day. Then, I divide the side-food in a similar way (be it fries, vegetables, or whatever). If I’m visiting the south, known for its hardy portions (texas, alabama, etc), I’ll actually divide it further, eating (for example) only half (or less) of the burger, and none of the fries– which means it becomes 3-4 days of lunches… for the family I’m staying with. Yes. You can give your leftovers to someone else. In fact, it’s considered really kind, if they like that kind of food. And since they’re usually the ones that took you to the restaurant, it may even be their favorite type of food.

Food is really a sign of affection, in every possible way, from the trope of “mother’s day means serving mom breakfast in bed” to “cutting the wedding cake is one of the most important wedding photos” to “one of our holidays literally has kids running up to every house in town in costume to ask for candy” to “BBQ sauces are a generationally-passed-down tradition.”