Leader urges ‘thriftiness,’ wages war on food waste
Chinese regulators are calling out livestreamers who binge-eat for promoting excessive consumption. A school said it would bar students from applying for scholarships if their daily leftovers exceededa setamount. A restaurant placed electronic scales at its entrance for customerstoweighthemselves to avoid ordering too much.
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has declared awar on the “shocking and distressing” squandering of food, and the nation is racing to respond, with some going to greaterextremesthanothers.
The ruling Communist Party has long sought to portray Xi as a fighter of excess and gluttony in officialdom, but this new call for gastronomic discipline is aimed at the public and carries a special urgency. When it comes to food security, Xi said, Chinese citizens should maintain a sense of crisis because of vulnerabilities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Cultivate thrifty habits and foster a social environmentwhere waste is shameful and thriftiness is applaudable,” Xi said in a directive carried by the official People’s Daily newspaper last week.
Xi’s edict is part of a broader message from the leadership in recent weeks about the importance of self-reliance in a time of tensions with the United States and other economic partners. The concern is that import disruptions caused by the global geopolitical turmoil, thepandemicandtrade tensions with the Trump administration, as well as some of China’sworst floods this year, could cut into food supplies.
But like somany top-down orders in China, the vaguely worded directive prompted a flurry of speculation. State news media moved quickly to tamp down panic about imminent food shortages, reporting that China had recently seen consecutive bumper grain harvests and record high grain output.
The edict was also met withsometimesham-handed measures. The restaurant that offeredtoweigh patrons in the central Chinese city of Changsha quickly drewa backlash and was forced to apologize over theweekend.
“Our intention was to advocate not wasting food and for people to order in a healthy way,” the restaurant said. “We never forced customers to weigh themselves.”
Xi’s “clean plate” campaign strikes at the heart of dining culture in China. Custom dictates that ordering extra dishes and leaving food behind are ways to demonstrate generosity toward one’s relatives, clients, business partners and important guests.
Such habits have contributed to an estimated 17 million to 18 million tons of food being discarded annually, an
amount that could feed 30 million to 50 million people for a year, according to a study by the ChineseAcademyofScienceandtheWorld Wildlife Fund.
Xi’s call is asmuch a warning against the dangers of profligacy as it is a reflection of the generational shift in values that has emerged as living standards rise.
For Xi, the issue of food security has taken on more importance as China grapples with overlapping crises including a shaky economy and severe floods that have left large swaths of the country’s farmland under water.
Foodprices climbed about 13% in July compared with a year ago, according toofficial statistics. The price of pork, a staple food for many Chinese families, increased by about 85% during that same period, in part because the floods affected production and transportation.
Farmers in the province of Henan, a crucial grain-producing region, admitted to stockpiling much of their grain harvests this year inthe hopes of selling for higher prices later, according to a report published Monday in the party-backed China Youth Daily newspaper.