There isn't enough food to waste

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By Hong Liang (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-03 07:48

It is time we stopped wasting food.

When I first came to Beijing several years ago, a colleague took me to dinner at a nearby restaurant. With an obvious intention to introduce me to the wide variety of Beijing cuisine, he ordered far too many dishes, some of which we didn't even touch. The bill, to my relief, was no more than 100 yuan.

I went back to the same restaurant a couple of weeks ago with another friend. We ordered just enough for two, and when the bill came, I was astounded to find that this simple meal cost us more than the elaborate one I had before in this same restaurant.

Indeed, simple economics dictate that we must learn to accept the fact that food will no longer be cheap and supply will be less assured than in the past. Of course, we are not staring down the face of an imminent food crisis. But the sharp surge in the prices of rice and other grains in the past several months has forcefully reminded us of a widely known adage: every grain of rice is a product of backbreaking work.

When I was in boarding school, my headmaster always insisted that we finished all the rice on our plates. He didn't have to worry about the meat because there never seemed to be enough of that for us anyway.

Of course, we were too young to care about the price of food at that time. But we knew that food was valuable because we were used to eating leftovers from previous meals at home.

As an adult in the 1980s, my habits changed with the times. That was the time when the Hong Kong economy was on the boil, jobs were plentiful, wages were rising and food was cheap. Leftovers were banned from our dinner tables and any food we couldn't finish in one meal went right to the garbage can.

Food prices had remained at rock-bottom levels throughout the 1980s and the 1990s while the markets in the developed world were glutted by a perennial oversupply of grains, meat, eggs and dairy products. A distressingly large proportion of that was wasted.

A study of food waste by the US Department of Agriculture showed that in 1997 some 27 percent of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the US was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up more than 60 percent of the waste. A new study is underway, according to a New York Times report.

Anyone who has lived in the US for an extended period of time should have no reason to doubt about those findings, no matter how odd they may seem. On the way to Los Angeles from San Francisco one morning in 1998, I stopped at a diner along the highway and ordered a regular breakfast. It came with three fried eggs, a huge serving of mashed potato, one tomato, a thick sausage and several slices of bacon. I didn't even count the toast which I didn't touch. I ended up wasting more than half of the food on that plate.

Some economists and politicians have blamed the latest surge in food prices to the rapid increase in demand from China and India, the world's largest and fastest growing developing countries. Rising income in those countries, the economists argued, has spurred the consumption of meat, which, in turn, has driven up the demand for grain feedstock. The threat of a global food shortage is real enough.

It is most unfair to ask people in those countries to cut down their meat consumption, which has remained small on a per capita basis compared to that of people in developed countries. The most sensible approach to minimize the risk associated with escalating food prices and looming shortage in supply is for us to cut down on wastage. That shouldn't be too hard a thing to do.

E-mail: jamesleung@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 06/03/2008 page8)