I came across an interesting phrase in Scottish Gaelic today: Ith do bhuntàta beag mus dig na Frangaich!, which means “eat your small potatoes before the French come!” and it is apparently said to children picking at their food to encourage them to eat up [source].
Are there similar phrases in other languages, perhaps used in different contexts?
What did your parents say to you to get you to finish your food?
Or if you have kids, what do you say to them, if they need encouragment?
My father used to tell us to clear the plate because “we do not have any pigs here” meaning that pigs were fed all the leftovers from the table.
The version I know is: “Children in Africa are starving, and you don’t want to finish your food!”, to which the answer is “Send my food to African children!”
Eat your dinner or else you won’t get your pudding!!!
@ Lev
Yes the philosophical nonsense of that phrase produced the same retort from me too. If kids don’t want to eat it’s nobody’s business to cajole them otherwise.
What Lev said! As a kid, I never understood how that was supposed to make me want to eat.
If the child finished their food, an adult might say approvingly that they were “a member of the Clean Plate Club”. (These days, this is discouraged in articles about trying to cut overeating.)
In Cantonese, they will say that if you don’t finish all your rice, be careful that you will find a woman that has pitted skin face as your wife in the future (唔食晒d飯，因住第時娶個豆皮婆)
@Lev
Growing up I would hear about “the starving children in Africa” all the time. During the 90s it was usually starving children in Somalia and for my parents’ generation starving children in Biafra.
Did anybody hear of starving children in India? This was my aunt’s favorite.