China’s Xi Jinping declares war on food waste

Chinese regulators are inviting livestreamers to binge-eat to promote excessive consumption. One school said it would prevent students from applying for scholarships if their daily allowances exceeded a certain amount. A restaurant placed electronic scales at the entrance for customers to venture out not to order too much.

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has declared war on “shocking and distressing” food waste, and the nation is racing to respond, with some reaching greater extremes than others.

The ruling Communist Party has long sought to portray Mr. Xi as a fighter of excess and gutony in the bureaucracy, but this new call for gastronomic discipline is aimed at the public and carries a special urgency. When it comes to food security, Mr. Xi said, Chinese citizens need to maintain a sense of crisis due to vulnerabilities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Cultivate frugal habits and foster a social environment where waste is shameful and thriftiness is applauded,” Mr Xi said in a directive last week by the official People’s Daily newspaper.

Mr Xi’s edict is part of a broader message from the leadership in recent weeks on the importance of self-confidence in a time of tensions with the United States and other trading partners. The concern is that disruptions to imports caused by the global geopolitical unrest and the pandemic, as well as some of the worst floods in the country this year, could cut into food bans.

But like so many top-down orders in China, the vaguely worded directive caused a flurry of speculation. State news media moved quickly to panic over severe food shortages, reporting that China had recently seen successive oysters from bumper grain and recorded high grain production.

The edict was also met with sometimes with ham hand measurements. The restaurant that offered to weigh patterns in the central Chinese city of Changsha soon fell behind and was forced to make excuses over the weekend.

“Our intention was to advocate for spoiling food and for ordering people in a healthy way,” the restaurant said. “We have never forced customers to weigh themselves.”

The “clean sheet” campaign of Mr. Xi strikes at the heart of the food culture in China. Custom dictates that ordering extra dishes and leaving food behind are ways to demonstrate genosity towards relatives, clients, business partners and important guests.

Such habits have contributed to an estimated 17 million to 18 million tons of food annually, an amount that could feed 30 million to 50 million people a year, according to a study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the World Wildlife Fund.

Mr. Xi’s call is as much a warning against the dangers of vulnerability as it is a reflection of the generational shift in values ​​that has arisen as living standards increase.

Savings campaigns may not seem out of place in modern China, where cities with gleaming skyscrapers and luxury malls are buzzing with fancy cars. But they were often in the era of Mao Zedong, when the People’s Daily would urge citizens to “eat only two meals a day, one of which should be soft and liquid.”

Wang Yaqin, a 79-year-old retiree in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin, remembers the years of famine plagued by Mao’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward campaign from 1958 to 1962. In those years, Ms. Wang said, not much else to eat besides beet pulp – often used to feed horses and cattle – mixed with sweet corn noodles.

Although the food is now plentiful, Mrs. Wang remains restless by simply throwing it out. Once, she said, she even picked up some garlic cloves that her children threw away, rinsed and ate.

“This campaign is brilliant,” Ms Wang said in a telephone interview. “Although it seems like a small thing, it’s good if even one watt of electricity and one drop of water can be saved.”

Many of the younger generation of the country, such as Samantha Pan, a 21-year-old student in Guangzhou, embrace being free from worrying about saving food for a rainy day, and keep a little eye on the moral appeal of the state.

“This kind of initiative is very boring and useless,” Ms. Pan said in a telephone interview. “I have the right to order as much food as I want. If I just want to get rid of food, it’s still my freedom. ”

For Mr. Xi, the issue of food security has taken on more importance as China struggles with overlapping crisis, including a shaky economy and severe floods that have submerged large swaths of the country’s agricultural land.

Food prices climbed about 13 percent in July compared to a year ago, according to official statistics. The price of pork, a staple food for many Chinese families, increased by about 85 percent during the same period, in part because the floods affected production and transportation.

Farmers in the central Chinese province of Henan, a crucial region for grain production, allowed many of their grain crops to be harvested this year in hopes of selling them later for higher prices, according to a report published Monday in ‘ the party-backed China Youth Daily.

As tensions with other countries escalate, the party has embraced the potential for international cuts – and to ensure it can produce enough food to feed China’s 1.4 billion people.

“In an ideal environment, international relations would be very good and China could import food free from other places,” said Hu Xingdou, a Beijing-based political economist. “But in practice, China may have some major problems.”

Wu Qiang, a Beijing-based political analyst, said the pandemic and the floods were reminiscent of the challenges facing the Chinese emperors, whose legitimacy rested largely on their perceived ability to bring harmony between people and nature. retained.

By taking steps to prevent a food shortage in advance, Mr Xi is showing that he recognizes the challenge that these crises, if left unchecked, could hold his position in power, Mr Wu said. “So now he put the responsibility on the people, and tells them to be frugal,” he said.

But some restaurant owners are reluctant to bear the cost of Mr. Xi.

Jimmy Zhang, the owner of a home-style restaurant in the city of Linyi, in the eastern province of Shandong, said he supported Mr Xi’s call but did not want to encourage customers to order fewer dishes.

“What the country promotes is good, but as a citizen, the policy is too far removed from me,” Mr Zhang said, adding that the cost of rent and wages of workers was rising. “There can be no way to support them without losing money.”

The campaign also casts doubt on the entire business model that drives a niche corner of the Chinese Internet – livestreamers who have gained notoriety by registering themselves to eat large amounts of food.

Known as “big belly kings”, many such video bloggers attract hordes of fans and rely on these shows for income. China’s state broadcaster, CCTV, slammed such performances in a recent headline caption: “Live streaming is fine, but do not use food when you prop!”

China’s largest platform and social media platforms – including Douyin, China’s version of TikTok and Kuaishou – said they would punish users who were seen eating food in their broadcasts.

A video blogger, who until recently took the name ‘Big Stomach Mini’ and once ate a whole roasted lamb in one meal, posted a new video on her social media page last week in which she urged her followers to enjoy every bite of food and take leftovers home. The video drew messages of support from some of its 11 million fans.

“There’s nothing wrong with enjoying delicious cuisine,” said the blogger, who has since changed her name to the more sober-sounding “Dimple Mini.” “But please do not be extravagant and disgusting.”