Miss Manners: She dumped the soup she didn’t eat back in communal pot

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Once a month, I make a four-gallon pot of soup for my small church community. When planning the soup, I keep in mind the many food sensitivities that members of the community have, and still manage to serve a tasty variety of soups.

Today, a member served herself a large bowl of soup, seasoned it, took a few bites, then dumped the remainder of her soup back into the pot. I approached her and asked her why she had done that, and she said it was more than she could eat.

I told her she should have dumped the extra soup in the compost bucket. I told her to never do that again. She acted as though I was being rude.

For food safety, I should have dumped the entire pot of soup into the compost, but I did not. I warned another member that the soup was no longer free of the…