Leftovers

November 24, 2025

Greetings from the Wrap Party,

This week will mark an important event in our country. (Pause here and hold your breath for dramatic effect.)

Thursday is Thanksgiving, ostensibly a day when we celebrate the relocation of homeless people by American Patriots. (I use the word ‘ostensibly’ because I am confident no one will look up the definition this early in the essay.)  Thanksgiving is an important event, but it is only part of the big picture. It is, some would say, the penultimate event. (Don’t pretend to reach for the dictionary.)

The real event is Leftovers, (capitalized here to signify importance).

Every year on Thanksgiving we create gargantuan meals to celebrate the first season of the original ‘Survivor’, and the bounty of the country. It is a fun reason to get together and gorge ourselves in between innings or periods or quarters or whatever is on TV in the Rumpus Room. But that is really just setting the stage for our real intention.  Leftovers.

It’s not uncommon to make a meal and not eat all of it, but on Thanksgiving, we take that to a near zealot level. I mean, it’s kind of flaunting our bounty. (‘Flaunting Our Bounty’ is an excellent name for a rock band. Sorry Dave.) After all, it’s not as if we need to hoard to get through the winter in case we can’t get to Costco.

The thing that most people don’t realize is that leftovers didn’t just occur organically. If you consider the first settler’s Puritan ethic and the scarcity of food, they would never have thought to risk wasting anything.  No, the concept of leftovers was created by The Leftover Industrial Complex.

The LIC largely consists of the manufacturers of aluminum foil, cling wrap, wax paper, Tupperware, and all the other plastic Cool Whip containers that we reuse to keep food in. This shadow organization has been manipulating the American consumer since the pilgrims were faced with too much maize.

Studies have shown (a phrase meaning that what I am about to say may have elements of mendacity) that the average American family uses 24 rolls of cling wrap each year, and 23 of them are on Thanksgiving. (Not to mention the thousands of yards of cling wrap ruined by trying to actually free the cling wrap from the box it comes in, despite the handy serrated blade attached to it, which was designed to cut human flesh while ignoring the temptation of plastic film.)

Just as proof of the power of the LIC, there is now a fad that takes place this time of year called The Saran Wrap Ball Game.  Families wrap cheap prizes inside of layer upon layer of cling wrap until they have created a near impenetrable basketball sized wad of plastic and dollar-store detritus.  The purpose of the game is allegedly to create a fun distraction from the dirty dishes on Thanksgiving, but it’s clear that this is a device to maximize the cling wrap consumption.

One of my favorite uses of leftovers is making a Thanksgiving Panini. This sandwich features turkey and dressing and cranberries and whatever else will fit, all pressed between two pieces of bread and grilled on a panini press.  (I bought my wife a panini press for her birthday a few years ago but now I can’t find it, and I can’t ask her where it is because she hasn’t spoken to me since I bought her a panini press for her birthday a few years ago.)

This year we will have Thanksgiving dinner at my daughter’s house, so she asked that we bring a dish to pass. Ordinarily this might mean there will be no leftovers for me, but you can trust in the powerful influence of the LIC.  My wife is making two turkeys, enough cranberry sauce to fill a kiddy pool and a metric tonne (spelled this way for my Canadian readers) of mashed potatoes. 

I wanted to share this information about the Leftover Industrial Complex as a public service, so you would understand how you are being manipulated by a faceless organization which only exists to take advantage of you and make gargantuan profits which will fund the lifestyles of a few greedy, and unattractive, people, but I don’t want to ruin your holiday. (Maybe I should have written that sentence first, might have saved you reading this far.)

Celebrate the day on Thursday, hold your friends and family close, find the reasons to be grateful, which might very well include a giant plastic bowl of deviled eggs covered with aluminum foil held in place by a rubber band.

I just realized I forgot to tell you to stop holding your breath.  So, if you are still conscious, breathe.

Hope this finds you giving thanks for whatever is in the fridge,

David

Copyright © 2025 David Smith