I HAVE SPENT much of my adult life traveling the world in pursuit of food. As a chef , obsessive eater, and amateur food anthropologist, I have planned trips around eating: multi-day street-food crawls, three or four restaurants in a day, 10-, 20-, even 40-course tasting menus. At the time, it didn’t feel excessive. It felt like research. It felt like joy. It felt like my job.

But my relationship with food started somewhere very different.

I grew up modestly and was taught early that you cleaned your plate. Food was something you respected because you didn’t always have an abundance of it. Wasting food was unacceptable.

That lesson followed me into my career.…