Knowing how I have this weird obsession with standing up for people who work in food service, my dad sent me a link to this USA Today story about dining tips.

The man offering the tips, 40-year-old Steve Dublanica, formerly maintained a secret identity while posting at his blog, WaiterRant.net.

An excerpt from the Q&A:

Q. You say 80% of those who eat out are nice people. And the rest?

A. The other 20% are the Jeffrey Dahmers of customers. They come in without a reservation. Then they start yelling, “I want the best seat in the restaurant” and park themselves at the table. They yell. They snap their fingers. They want to be treated like rock stars. They’re rude, entitled and bad tempered.

Q. In the decade you’ve waited tables, have customers become ruder?

A. People’s social graces are diminishing somewhat. Civility is down.

Q. What are the five worst customer sins?

A. Not being polite — your basic please and thank you. Tipping less than 15%. Grabbing the waiter. Ordering things not on the menu. And saying, “I’m friends with the owner.”

Dublanica says he “outgrew” his alter ego, “The Waiter,” and decided to move to perhaps greener pastures, turning his experiences into a book called “Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip — Confessions of a Cynical Waiter.”

That’s a pretty good title. Might be almost better than “How Not to Be a Food Snob”…

I’m the kind of person who always has milk in her fridge that is several weeks past its expiration date.

It’s hard to cook for one person and it’s even harder to shop for one person. I’ll go to Don Quijote resolved to eat healthier and stock up on fresh fruit and vegetables that grow green and fuzzy two weeks later when I don’t eat them.

Finishing everything on your plate used to be a moral issue, but it’s quickly becoming an economic issue for many of us in Hawaii, where food is becoming more and more expensive. How much does a quart of milk cost now? $3.00?

According to one government study, Americans waste more than one quarter of food available for consumption. That amounts to about a pound of food per person each day. The New York Times also quoted an EPA study in March which estimated that Americans waste roughly 30 million tons of food each year — about 12 percent of the total waste stream.

I know I ought to eat at home more and eat out less, because it creates additional dilemmas. I always end up with several take-out containers I can’t finish because the restaurant portion was three sizes too large in the first place. Leftovers often go bad — the food is never as good as it was in the restaurant.

(Looking at the expanding American waistline, it’s not like we NEED portions that are three times too big!)

So, what if we could train ourselves to waste less food?

This from an NYT editorial last week:

[E]liminating food waste won’t solve the problems of world hunger and greenhouse-gas pollution. But it could make a dent in this country and wouldn’t require a huge amount of effort or money. The Department of Agriculture estimated that recovering just 5 percent of the food that is wasted could feed four million people a day; recovering 25 percent would feed 20 million people.

So, for our pocketbooks, and for those suffering because of food shortages in other regions of the world, here are some tips from The Guardian on how to “waste not” …

- Ignore two-for-one deals, which are often offered on items nearing their expiration date.
- Shop daily for perishables like vegetables, fish and meat to avoid these items going bad.
- Buy non-perishables in bulk. Hello Costco and Sam’s Club!
- Become savvy at storing food and making it last longer. Visit www.lovefoodhatewaste.com for more tips.
- Write out a meal plan for the week.
- Buy quality not quantity — you’re more likely to finish that quality loaf of bread before it goes bad than the cheap supermarket version.
- Rediscover packed lunches.
- Don’t be afraid of an empty fridge. Says the expert, having a full fridge is “an aspirational thing.”

Lovefoodhatewaste.com and wastedfood.com are good sites to check for more tips and information.

photo: Inside my fridge yesterday. Shield your eyes, Mom!

I stopped by Subway to pick up a sandwich around 2:30 p.m. yesterday and ordered a 6-inch Chicken Bacon Ranch. They added cheese, toasted it at my request, neatly arranged the plastic-wrapped chicken pieces on the bread, then asked if I wanted mayo on it. I said “no.”

The woman preparing the sandwich proceeds to grab the mayo container and squirt it all over the chicken pieces. Then, she reaches for the ranch dressing. It was at that point that I think she realized her error. So, to fix it, she takes a knife and starts scraping off the biggest dollops of mayo, the ones that haven’t already oozed their way in between the chicken chunks. She then adds the ranch dressing and vegetables and wraps the sandwich, as I stare through the plastic food guard.

I think maybe if the sandwich hadn’t already been toasted, they might have started the process all over again. But it was too late. The sandwich was already toasted; the American cheese and chicken already added. There was no turning back.

Others would have demanded another sandwich. But me, I paid my $9.00 for the meal, took the ranch-and-mayo covered sandwich and dealt with it.

Having worked as a waitress in food establishments in Hawaii, Massachusetts and New York City, I’ve seen a lot. There was the ostensibly nice gentleman who inquired, if my mother was ethnically Chinese and I was from Hawaii, how the heck was my English so good? There was the table of 12 from Europe who ran up a $300+ bill at a French restaurant I worked at in Brooklyn, spilled salad and chocolate ice cream all over the floor, and left $0 for a tip. And don’t even get me started on my experiences working as a manager at my college dining hall.

But the worst in my opinion are the picky eaters — the ones who quibble over the shades of pink between medium and medium rare, or who send back a sandwich with tomatoes instead of just removing the offending vegetables with a fork.

I always talk to one of my best friends, a veteran of Zippy’s, about how working in food service builds character. We’ve thought of writing a guide book for diners called something like “How Not to Be a Food Snob” — although, admittedly, that was one of the, um, TAMER titles we tossed out in discussions.

Tip #36: Always leave a cash tip. It’s easier for wait staff, and in many places eliminates them having to rely on the cashier to open the register to exchange credit card tips for cash. At the restaurant I worked at in Brooklyn, the manager, who was the only one who could tip out wait staff from the register, suddenly underwent an operation and didn’t return to work until after I had quit — cheating me out of about $100 in credit card tips.

Probably because of my experience working on the other side, as a customer I try to refrain from sending back food unless (a) it’s the wrong order, (b) it looks like it might make me deathly ill, or (c) it’s not quite dead … or has something not quite dead crawling in it.

I do get that sometimes you should be demanding about your food. Especially if you’re paying a lot at a fancy restaurant for a meal. But there are ways to request good food and good service without being mean about it. Remember Tip #45 — Food service is a stressful and often thankless job that doesn’t pay well, and there’s often more to the person who’s serving your hamburger than just their funny outfit or how skillfully they refill your drink.

And if you can’t remember Tip #11 (Be Nice), then you just gotta remember Tip #1 — Don’t Mess with the Person Who Handles Your Food.