With weigh scales and fines, Chinese restaurants race to follow Xi Jinping’s food waste instructions

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Restaurants are weighing leftovers – and, in one case, even customers – and penalizing people with too much left uneaten. One eatery is punishing servers if customers haven’t sufficiently cleaned their plates, while others reduce portion sizes. A university is threatening to revoke scholarships for students deemed to have left too much uneaten. Social-media sites are censoring search terms and urging users to “eat smart” if they look for popular videos of people consuming big portions.

Last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping called on the country to promote thrift and combat food waste, citing the need to protect food security amid a time of pandemic uncertainty. In the days that followed, local officials, industry associations, restaurants and even tech companies have been swept up in the mass campaign.

The swiftness and scale of the response to Mr. Xi’s new food-waste mandate has underscored the power the Chinese leader has amassed to reshape the country, as consumers and businesses alike rush to show deference – at least one restaurant chain acted with such zeal that it subsequently apologized after provoking internet outrage with a plan to serve food according to how much diners weighed.

Food waste is a worldwide problem, one China has long struggled to address by attempting to stamp out traditions of abundant ordering. In 2017, researchers at the China Academy Science said China’s large cities alone wasted 17 to 18 million tons of food a year, enough to feed 30 to 50 million people. (Globally, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says, 1.3 billion tonnes in food goes to waste each year, the product of 28 per cent of the world’s agricultural land.)

Mr. Xi is not the first Chinese leader to preach parsimony at the dinner table. Mao Zedong in 1959 urged officials to “stress the food problem,” trimming consumption in times of lighter labour. Food security has been a Communist Party priority since the dawn of its rule. A 2013 “clear your plate” campaign dates from the earliest days of Mr. Xi’s rule. In the years since, anti-corruption efforts have imposed prohibitions on luxury spending, including on lavish banquets, by functionaries and Party members.

But the new food-waste demands come at a time when “China has entered an era of fine management, which means government is focusing on more detailed things,” said Zheng Fengtian, a scholar in the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development at Renmin University. That has included sweeping mandates to sort garbage and food waste, as Chinese authorities continue a broader effort to confront the country’s smog and other environmental problems.

Prof. Zheng has been an advocate for fighting food waste, writing in 2013 that China can learn from Japanese respect for food and even the Prohibition-era U.S., with its civil-society battles against drunkenness. Food is wasted throughout the system, he said, including by farmers whose crops rot in storage. Fattening waist lines – a quarter of the country’s adults are now overweight or obese – have added further impetus for change.

Tackling the problem is “something we have always advocated,” Prof. Zheng said. “The difference this time is just that it was addressed by the superior leader,” he said.

“One of our country’s major advantages is that people are generally willing to listen to a call from government.”

Among the first to respond was Chuiyan Catering Company, which operates 15 restaurants specializing in local cuisine and fried beef dishes in the Hunan city of Changsha. Following Mr. Xi’s announcement, CEO Tan Yan gathered employees together for a brainstorming session. One employee suggested weighing diners to assess how much food each should be allowed.

“The reason we adopted it was very simple: I thought the usual ways, like reminding people as they place orders, wasn’t effective enough to affect their thinking about this problem. Using body weight to create a food plan is more scientific,” Ms. Tan said in an interview.

The weigh-in was voluntary, she said. But when the plan went public, internet users made Chuiyan the target of mockery and criticism. “A terrible marketing strategy,” read one popular comment on the Twitter-like Weibo service. “You may be praised by government as a model, but what you’ve lost is your customer’s heart.” Another person worried that “an example like this could be used by government once again as an excuse to reach their fingers into more areas of people’s lives.”

Chuiyan issued a public apology. The company is now providing free take-away service and has instructed wait staff to discuss with customers “the theory of ordering dishes based on their appetite,” Ms. Tan said. “What we should do is to stick to our original intent, keep in mind the correctness of the government’s plan and play our own role,” she said, pointing to the advantages of a countrywide effort of this sort.

“It will undoubtedly strengthen the unity of people,” she said. “When we are mobilized toward a common goal, the power created in this process is beyond imagination.” That will “help us achieve great goals in the future.”

Across China, restaurants have raced to show compliance. The Xi’an Real Love Chinese Restaurant said servers will be assessed on how much food customers leave behind, with the worst performers penalized. In Chongqing, one buffet restaurant charged 10 yuan, roughly $2, for leftovers in excess of 50 grams, roughly the weight of a lime. Another buffet required a 20 yuan deposit before customers could fill plates. In Liaoning province, large groups have been urged to order two fewer dishes than the number of people at the table.

In the city of Harbin, online ordering platforms have created new “small” and “half” dish sizes. In Ningxia province, a restaurant owner won state media praise for eating his customers’ leftovers. At Zhengyuan School in the Hunan city of Leiyang, administrators pledged to strip scholarships from students in classes whose food remnants exceed 100 grams a day.

Online, meanwhile, makers of mukbang videos – in which people eat often enormous quantities of food – have been chastened. On short-video site Bilibili, searches for “mukbang” now turn up only content promoting adherence to the new anti-waste policy. A mukbang personality with 659,000 followers, jiushiqiqi, said she had been told the list of new taboos include video titles that indicate large quantities of foods, eating in “abnormal ways” or the use of wide-angle lenses to accentuate the appearance of food quantity.

The campaign comes at a particularly tough time for restaurateurs, after China’s catering industry saw July revenues decline 11 per cent compared to last year.

But those in the industry said it’s not a case of a nanny state monitoring the plates of the nation.

Combatting food-waste is, instead, an exhortation to live better, said Wang Xiaping, manager of the food and beverage department at Xinghualou restaurant in Shanghai, which has changed its portion sizes to better accommodate smaller orders.

“These actions reflect the core and spirit of an advanced civilization, which is something we are supposed to chase,” she said. “The public and those in the catering industry can all relate to the important thoughts behind the anti-waste campaign promoted by President Xi.”

The new campaign has illustrated “the sycophancy of the system in which party-state organizations and cadres are mobilized in response to Xi’s whims,” said Adam Ni, director of China Policy Centre in Canberra. “In this case, it’s a campaign against food wastage. In the future, it will be something else.”

It’s a question of “how the party is affecting how people live,” he said.

“Even if you stay as far as possible from politics” – such as an online personality streaming his hotpot meal – “politics in Xi’s China could come and find you.”

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