DOGGIE BAG

The history of leftovers would be difficult to trace, but the doggie bag’s origin is clear. In 1946, so as not to embarrass budget-conscious customers at his Steak Joint restaurant on Greenwich Avenue in New York, proprietor Dan Stampler came up with the idea of suggesting they take their steak bone (and whatever meat remained on it) home “for the dog.” Mr. Stampler designed a bag with a picture of his Scottish terrier on it and he called it a doggie bag. In 1947, the Bagcraft Corporation of Chicago, Illinois, began manufacturing them, and two years later Janice Meister, whose husband cofounded Bagcraft, wrote what may be the most widely disseminated poem of the twentieth century:

Oh where, oh where have your leftovers gone?
Oh where, oh where can they be?
If you’ve had all you can possibly eat,
Please bring the rest home to me!!

The poem, titled “Doggie Bag,” appeared on more than 150 million bags, the verse surrounded by cartoon faces of five happy canines, four with tongues wagging. (The fifth, a boxer, appears glad but more businesslike.) An annotation above the image of the slavering pack of canines says, “This special greaseproof bag is provided with the compliments of your host.” Unlike professional poets Maya Angelou or Dr. Seuss, Mrs. Meister received no royalties for her work. She granted it free in perpetuity to her husband’s company, which she took over when he died in the early 1980s. She wrote only one other published poem— the little-known “Ode to Potato Chips”—for a Chicago snack manufacturer.

Even today, when many restaurants serve portions so large they inevitably wind up in take-home containers for next-day human consumption, the term doggie bag frequently is used to describe whatever the food is packed in. There is seldom pretense that the uneaten porterhouse will wind up in doggy’s dish; indeed, fine restaurants send home leftovers in swan-shaped foil wrappers and carry-handle shopping bags as nice as those from a high-tone department store. But still, the white lie endures, rooted in archaic etiquette that says polite people do not gnaw bones, either in restaurants or at home, and that taking a bag full of food to reheat and eat is less couth, not to mention less humane, than serving a deserving pooch.