There’s one piece of chicken left – do you take it?

I sat at the table eying the last piece of chicken, everyone was long finished their food, but I could tell there were others with the same thoughts as I, they too were wondering fi anyone else wanted the last piece of chicken. It was one of those big pieces, you know, limps hanging off with good juicy meat and bone coinciding to make it one of those prized pieces that people wonder how it made it through the meal without devoured.

I myself wondered how I could go about this, could I just take the piece without seeming like a pig? I am sure everyone else wondered this as well, even if only my imagination was working over time.

This tends to happen quite a bit to me, faced with the last piece of anything good at the shabbos table, I debate on what to do. Sometimes its as easy as Kugel, you can merely cut it in half and appear to be humane, but that’s a cop out, I want the whole piece and here I am trying to make people think highly of me based on my refusal to take the last piece of food.

Salad is the worst in my opinion, there’s always that small amount that you don’t want to leave over, but you just took enough to feed a small African country so you decide to leave over just enough to get a small piece of challah soggy.

Then you have those times at Kiddush where no one wants to take first, its like, oh here you cut ahead of me on the cholent line because I’m too politically correct to take before a woman. It sucks man, and then people look at me like I’m nuts when I take first.

Similar situations as this would happen in school, I wonder if this is a state school phenomena and private college kids are more mature, but at my school no one would go into the classroom first. I would show up and there’d be 30 people waiting outside of an empty lecture hall. I would always go in and the throngs would follow me, like people were embarrassed to make the first move or something.

What do you do during the last piece of food dilemma?