During an interview on the NPR program "Fresh Air," host Terry Gross asked
Matthew Weiner to give an example of a story that he had always wanted to tell on the show that he had finally made room for in the final season, and the one he chose was when Betty accompanies Bobby on his class's farm field trip and he trades away her sandwich. Then Weiner went on to reveal that that seemingly small story was actually a close retelling of a traumatic incident from his own childhood in which his own mother really chaperoned one of his school field trips and he really did give away her lunch--he traded her sandwich for gumdrops. He said, "She didn't really participate in school that much. And I was so in love with her and so excited that she had come along, and then I kind of ruined it. . . . I'd never seen her eat, so it was kind of shocking to me that she had brought lunch for her. But I--it was irreversible and something that I would wake up and be crying about, you know, for years, you know, just like, oh, why did I do that? Why did I give her sandwich away? It's funny because it makes her sound bad in a way, and I'm aware of that. But I actually feel like what stories like this show is that maybe it's the combination of a slightly insensitive parent and an incredibly oversensitive child. So I--we both bear culpability in it. But that was a story that I was like, nobody gives a crap about that. Why are we doing that? And I had told that, like, the first week of the first season, and it was in the notes. . . . My mother was always dieting, and sometimes she failed. And she had put on weight at a certain point like Betty did, and then now she's the skinniest person in the entire world."
