Biting off more than we can chew

Updated: 2016-06-16 07:50

By Xu Wei(China Daily USA)

Experts are calling for more measures to prevent wastage in restaurants and at the family dining table, as Xu Wei reports.

As he sat in a seafood restaurant in Shanghai, Liu Yao was surprised to see more food going into garbage bags than was actually being consumed, but he was even more surprised that nobody seemed to care.

"They (the diners) were toasting each other, exchanging pleasantries and trying to charm each other. Eating was probably the last thing on their minds," said Liu, a researcher with the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Liu took part in a research program into food wastage at restaurants in four cities - Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu in Southwest China's Sichuan province, and Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet autonomous region.

He said the problem is especially severe in large restaurants because they are the usual venues for business discussions and networking events.

"The customers were only using dinner as a platform for negotiations. They didn't really care about the food itself," he added.

The research conducted by the institute found that diners at large restaurants wasted an average 130.19 grams of food, while those at fast food restaurants wasted 39.09 grams.

"The more high-priced or luxurious the restaurant, the more waste there is," he said.

By weighing the dishes before and after each meal, the researchers were able to identify a number of factors that could be responsible for wastage in restaurants, including age, gender, and the scale and the type of eatery. Based on research in the four cities, the researchers estimated that more than 25 million metric tons of food is wasted in the country's public catering sector every year.

Cheng Shengkui, the institute researcher who led the program, said wastage at official banquets has been curbed dramatically in the four years since the start of the official anti-corruption and frugality campaign. Meanwhile, the government-backed Operation Clean Plate, which encourages people not to order too much at restaurants and to eat everything provided, is also having an impact. However, that does not mean wasteful behavior and lavish dinners have been eradicated altogether.

A large number of business banquets at high-end restaurants have not been affected by the frugality campaign, and big restaurants are switching their focus from government-sponsored banquets to attract more trade from the general public, Cheng said.

He explained that Chinese etiquette requires hosts to provide large amounts of food for their guests. "If all the food on the table is finished after a banquet, it could be interpreted as the host not showing enough largesse," he said.

Cheng noted that food wastage was once prevalent among wealthy people, but the growth of average personal incomes has seen the problem spreading. "Now, it seems everybody is wasting food. People now take wastage for granted," he said.

Obvious impact

Last year, Cheng's team of 140 researchers and volunteers monitored food wastage at 3,357 dining tables in 366 restaurants in the four cities chosen for the survey.

The researchers noted the obvious impact of the frugality drive on the catering sector and food wastage in restaurants, with some high-end eateries forced to close as a result of a decline in the number of customers and official banquets.

"Some even started offering boxed lunches and delivered food to customers," Liu said.

The researchers found that restaurants in Shanghai wasted an average 94.9 grams of food per person per meal, while consumers in Beijing wasted an average 79.2 grams.

"We were surprised to find that wasteful behavior is so common in restaurants in Shanghai, where the dishes are generally served on smaller plates than in the northern provincial areas," he said.

"Meanwhile, there are signs that Clean Your Plate campaign is having less impact in cities with a strong business environment, such as Shanghai."

Clean Your Plate campaign was initiated in 2013 by nongovernmental organizations and urged people to save food.

In Lhasa, the researchers witnessed another typical trend: although many tourists had lost their appetites because of the high altitude, they still wanted to try the local cuisine.

"That is typical of wasteful behavior by tourists across the country. It's common for them to try the local cuisine but to find it unappetizing," said Zhang Dan, another member of the research team.

According to an April 2014 report published by the China Cuisine Association, the catering sector's total revenue grew by 9 percent to 2.56 trillion yuan ($389 billion) in 2013, the weakest growth in more than 20 years. Meanwhile, 42 enterprises among the sector's top 100 businesses saw their net profit decline, while six suffered major losses.

Feng Enyuan, the association's vice-president, said that since the start of the frugality campaign, consumption by the general public now accounts for as much as 85 percent of the sector's turnover, although he admitted that the association has no statistics about the amount of food wasted in the sector every year.

Gender and age

The researchers identified a number of factors, including age and gender, that significantly affect food wastage.

"Men generally waste more food than women, while people aged 50 or older waste significantly less than people younger than them," Cheng, the professor, said.

He added that men generally attend more business-related dinners than women, and "men generally order more, consume more and waste more".

The researchers discovered that food wastage rises in tandem with the number of people attending a dinner, and the volume of wastage peaks when nine people are taking part.

"That is because a banquet becomes more formal as the number of people rises. The less the banquet is about eating, the more waste there may be," he said.

The research also showed that the level of education plays an important part in with food wastage in restaurants; better-educated people waste less food than those with a lower level of academic achievement.

Cheng said the less-educated the consumer, the more eager they are to flaunt their wealth at business banquets, resulting in greater wastage of food.

Wang Cunhua, a 23-year-old waitress at a restaurant in Beijing's Chaoyang district, said wasteful behavior is more prevalent a mong men and younger customers.

"Compared with females, male customers pay more attention to displaying their generosity. They also drink more and the more they drink, the more wastage there will be because they ignore the food," she said.

However, she added the most significant factor is the widespread fear of "losing face" when not enough food is provided for guests, which means the host generally orders far more food than is necessary. "The cost of 'face' is unbelievably high at dinner parties," she said.

The researchers calculated that this could result in 20 grams of food being wasted per person per meal. Another reason is that guests consume far more than usual at dinner parties to indicate that they have enjoyed the food, which could result in 80 grams of food being wasted per person per meal, according to the research.

Trend irreversible

Food is also being lost outside the commercial catering sector. In a 2013 interview, Ren Zhengxiao, head of the State Administration of Grain, said 35 million tons of grain is lost every year during transportation, storage and processing.

Poor storage facilities, which resulted in deterioration and loss from scavengers, resulted in the loss of 20 million tons of food, while poor transportation methods - such as horse drawn carriages and tricycles - and the inadequate packaging used by many farmers resulted in the loss of about 7.5 million tons of grain.

Fan Shenggen, director-general of the International Food Policy Research Institute, said more food is lost during the processing and storage stages than during retailing or consumption.

Wastage and preventable loss of food are especially disturbing because China still has 150 million people living on the breadline, and child malnutrition is still a big challenge. Nearly 10 percent of Chinese children were classified as "stunted", he said.

Cheng said that even with the government's best efforts to cut food wastage, the increase in the trend over the next decade could be irreversible.

"In China, a large proportion of food wastage takes place in the catering sector. That is exactly the opposite of Western countries, where wastage generally takes place at home and in the retail sector," he said.

"Food wastage in China is different from in Western countries in that it takes place more often in households and supermarkets. In the future, we expect to see more waste occurring in families and in retailing as more people move to the cities," he said.

The high rate of wastage in the catering sector was also highlighted by research led by Liu Junguo, a professor at Beijing Forestry University, who found that the rate is 5 percent in canteens and 7 percent in homes, but jumps to 19 percent in restaurants.

Cutting wastage

Fan said that while the Clean Your Plate campaign is laudable, more needs to be done to curb the problem, and it's important to change people's behavior and culture regarding food waste at the dining table. "But more important, consumers should be made aware of the best practices in safe storage, package dating, and households, as well as the societal benefits of reducing food wastage," he said.

"China can tackle the challenge by investing in preservation technologies and infrastructure, a change in government policies and the promotion of wider consumer knowledge about food wastage," he said.

Moreover, increased investment in production technology, infrastructure and post-harvest handling should also reduce post-yield losses, he added.

Feng, from the cuisine association, said restaurants can cut food wastage by providing more local produce and less "out-of-season" food.

"In my opinion, that would be a good way to cut carbon emissions and help the environment," he said.

Cheng, the professor, said the catering industry should establish standards that would allow restaurants to serve dishes of different sizes to give customers a wider range of options, he said. "Consumers should be informed about the amount of food in each dish on the menu. In many cases, people order a dish only to find that it's far beyond their consumption capacity," he said.

The authorities should also penalize restaurants to force them to curb wasteful behavior, such as charging them for wasting food cooked in house and also charging a fee for disposing of the waste.

"We found there is no motivation for some restaurants to even remind consumers that they have probably ordered too much. After all, the restaurants are trying to make a profit from their consumers," Cheng said.

Contact the writer at xuwei@chinadaily.com.cn

Students top of the class for wastage

Every year, 7,800 metric tons of food is wasted by school students in Beijing, according to recent research.

The study, conducted in four primary and four middle schools by the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that the students wasted an average 129.5 grams of food per person per meal, which is far above the average in other cities.

"What was even more stunning was that the students did not even think they were wasting the food. They believe that they should simply throw it away when they don't like it," said Cheng Shengkui, a professor with the institute who led the research.

Cheng said the wastage was most severe when students were provided with packed lunches from school feeding programs.

"I have seen lunch boxes being thrown away without even being opened. After all, they have enough pocket money from their parents that allows them to go to fast food restaurants instead," he said.

The research also discovered that parents were often unaware of their children's attitudes to food wastage. "They also believe it is quite normal for their children to waste some food," he said.

The students also expressed very low levels of satisfaction with the lunches provided in school feeding programs, which partly accounted for the wastage.

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that 71 percent of the students had little or no knowledge of the sources of their food.

"Many students just said the food came from supermarkets. They had no idea of how painstakingly the grains were planted, harvested and transported before being processed into food," Cheng said, adding that wastage on campus could be significantly reduced if students were given more options.

"Some students have very small appetites, but they were still given the same rations as other children. That really left them with no choice," he said.

Interest rises in food banks

China should establish a food bank system to salvage food that would otherwise go to waste, according to the leader of an international think tank.

Speaking on the sidelines of the G20 Agricultural Ministers Conference on June 3, Fan Shenggen, director-general of the International Food Policy Research Institute, said that a food bank system would allow households and retailers to share food products that are close to end of their shelf lives, and also enable food to be salvaged from restaurants.

Some researchers estimate that China's catering sector wastes more than 25 million metric tons of food every year.

According to Fan, a food bank system would significantly reduce wastage and help lift the burden from people on relatively low incomes: "Food banks would help to balance the diets of the less-well-off because they can also offer tips on healthy eating," he said.

The world's first food bank was established in the US in the 1960s, and since then many thousands have been set up across the world.

"Quite different from developed countries, food wastage in China takes place during grain production and at dinner tables," Fan said. "What is wasted at the dinner tables is generally food with a high nutritional value."

He added that households, retailers and supermarkets could use the internet to alert food banks to surpluses in a convenient way.

Left: A waitress cleans a table at a restaurant in Taiyuan, North China's Shanxi province, in 2013. Right: Students hold empty bowls after a meal at a primary school in Zaozhuang, East China's Shandong province. Provided To China Daily And Liu Mingxiang / For China Daily