My parents (tried and failed) to teach me similar values that they learned from their own parents. But it got me thinking--I wonder if these "old guard" values

My parents (tried and failed) to teach me similar values that they learned from their own parents. But it got me thinking--I wonder if these "old guard" values are related to food scarcity? We (peoples of industrialized nations), live in a world of abundance when it comes to food. High calorie food sources are cheap and plentiful. We don't need to chew our cheerios so much, because a machine already chewed them for us. We don't need to chew our chicken so much, because there's more where that came from. In fact, the "chew your food" lesson in childhood always came up during meals where we ate steak, and not so much other meals. Now part of this was due to the fact that the steak was tough and chewy (they cooked it well-done). However, I think it's worth considering the fact that steak is expensive, and if I was eating steak then there was not more where that came from. So maybe part of that "chew your food" lesson was actually a different one: "savor this food, because it's the last that you'll have until tomorrow." Notably, my recent ancestors were Okies.