Our eating habits are causing a global crisis

Our eating habits are causing a global crisis
作者：Wang Zi 时间：2013-01-30
Wang Zi
21st Century
Staff
Zhou Jinsong, a
canteen
manager at
Central South
University, said
that students
produce over
12 barrels of
leftovers on a
daily basis —
each barrel
stands at one
meter in height. Zhou’s canteen is just one of several on the cam pus.
But canteen waste is m erely the tip of the iceberg. According to Xinhua News Agency, the food wasted by Chinese people equates to about 50 million tons of grain every year, or 10 percent of the country’s total annual grain production.
This dumped food could feed another 200 million people. If that wa sn’t bad enough already, numbers around the world are even uglier (see graphics below).
Food waste, which has becom e a global issue, serves as a mirror that reflects various cultural and societal issues in different countries.
In the West, for instance, consum erism, the belief that it’s good to use a lot of goods and services, is often to blam e for food waste. China, in turn, features its own eating culture and a generation of single children that is less aware of the food waste issue.
New generation
Quantifying how much food college students, m ost of them
single children, waste is
a shocking exercise.
As a 2011 survey conducted by China Agricultural University shows, 28.3 percent of canteen food ends up in rubbish bins on cam puses nationwide, over twic e the national average (10 percent).
“What students waste every year could feed over 10 million people,” Zheng Chuguang, a m ember of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, told China Education Daily.
Gong Tao from the Youth League at Central South University, has seen a diminishing awareness of food waste on cam pus over the years.
“Students nowadays are well protected by their fam ilies and hardly have any concept of how m uch toil others go through in order to provide them with the food t hey eat,” he said.
Face counts
According to Yu Changjiang, a sociologist at Peking University, the communal dining tradition and the social function of banquets m ake food waste alm ost inevitable in China.
“Since the 1980s, when Chinese gradually becam e more affluent, food waste has been a subject of debate. But things have hardly changed over the years,” said Yu. “It’s the Chinese way of showing respect to guests and displaying generosity, often referred as mianzi.”
But rather than tradition, huge public spending on governm ent banquets is also fuelling food waste, said Zhou Xiaozheng from the sociology depart m ent at Renmin University of China.
“It’s the result of widespread reception m eals at government levels,” he told Economic Daily.
Extravagant gove rnment banquets at the taxpayer’s expense have becom e “a major source of waste, a degrading factor of social m orality and political
atm osphere”, commented People’s Daily last week.
China Daily added: “It is also important that everyone thinks about how th ey can do their bit to reduce food waste.”。