Diners face doggy bag directive to curb waste

CHINA

RESTAURANTS in southern China are to be punished with heavy fines if they allow diners to order too much food or fail to suggest a doggy bag.

The new rules, proposed by the Municipal Civilisation Office of Zhuhai city, are aimed at reducing the amount of food that goes to waste. An epidemic of ‘‘irrational ordering’’ has left China throwing away enough food to feed 200 million people a year.

Although the Zhuhai authorities have yet to explain how the rules will be policed, the scheme is intended to change China’s restaurant etiquette, under which customers over-order to impress their guests, while waiters rarely advise: ‘‘I think that’s enough.’’

Restaurants will be told that they must help customers to regulate their orders and ‘‘choose food reasonably’’ from the menu. Waiters should take account of the number of diners and the size of each dish when making the calculations required to dispense this advice, the Zhuhai Civilisation Office says.

If, as seems inevitable, meals still end with plenty of unfinished food, waiters will be obliged to suggest a doggy bag and the restaurant must be equipped with ap- propriate plastic boxes. Restaurant owners will be put on a warning the first time the rules are breached, then fined up to Rmb10,000 (NZ$2000) if they are persistently broken.

Zhuhai, which regards the obligation to recommend a doggy-bag as the most important pillar of the new restaurant regime, is also hoping that restaurateurs will start to display signs that read: ‘‘Civilised dining; morality is cultivated with thrift.’’

In March, when Xi Jinping assumed the presidency of China, he issued edicts designed to attack the culture of over-ordering – especially when officials were banqueting on the public purse.

This came after revelations that lavish government banqueting cost about Rmb300 billion – more than NZ$58b – last year.

Other campaigns to fight waste have emerged in recent months. Most prominent among them is ‘‘Operation Empty Plate’’, organised by the agricultural journalist Xu Zhijun.

His proposal was that people should start posting photographs of their empty plates on China’s equivalent of Twitter to encourage a culture of knowing the limits of one’s appetite and finishing everything that had been ordered.