Chinese president campaigns to avert food waste crisis
BEIJING: China is mulling mechanisms to prevent wastage of food days after President Xi Jinping called the amount of food wasted in the country “shocking”.
Xi’s renewed call for the “clean plate campaign” comes against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has battered the Chinese economy into contraction this year, and the worst floods in years impacting rice production areas in the country.
Xinhua news agency quoted Xi as calling the issue of food waste “shocking and distressing” and saying it was important to “…maintain a sense of crisis regarding food security”.
The phrase “sense of crisis” about food also recalls the time of Chinese leader Mao Zedong in the early 1960s when the country was ravaged by famines.
Beijing, however, has said that despite the twin problems of epidemic and floods, the agriculture sector has yielded “bumper harvests” this year. Catering groups, reports said, responded to Xi’s call by embracing a so-called “N-1 policy” - urging customers to order one dish fewer than the number of diners at a table.
No new national statistics is available about food wastage in China but a 2018 report by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said that in 2015, consumers wasted 17mn to 18mn tonnes of food served in big cities, an amount which could have fed 30mn to 50mn individuals, officials had pointed out.
Since Xi’s message, shortvideo platforms have begun to crack down on “competitive eaters”, many of whom waste or spit out the food they ordered.
“Such shows have been condemned by many netizens and generated heated discussions on Sina Weibo. The related hashtag had been viewed more than 830 million times as of Thursday afternoon,” a state media report said.