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We talk about saving but we squander food
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For a few days this week, I lunched alone at our canteen and enjoyed rare moments of eating in silent thankfulness to Mother Nature.
I would order a dish of green cabbage, a dish of potato and a cup of soup — simple things like that — to go with a bowl of rice. I would not waste a grain of rice or anything else I ordered, except in a few cases in which the dishes were unexpectedly greasy.
Even when our cooks sometimes did not live up to my expectations for quality meals, I would silently thank nature for what it had to offer me.
Such moments of silent thankfulness are rare because most of the time I go to lunch with a couple of colleagues or other acquaintances who may nitpick about food. They often talk my head off by carping about what they eat. At the end of a lunch, they may waste a lot of what they ordered — rice, meat or vegetables.
Food waste at our canteen spreads far beyond our table. After watching closely in the past four months, I have noticed that most people waste food most of the time. In almost all food trays stacked to be cleaned, I have seen leftovers — day in and day out.
To think that most of us are journalists who take upon ourselves to fight against food waste!
When you read our bylines in various news media, you may well be inspired by our calls to save food but, alas, in reality many of us waste food ourselves — months after months. Once I told a friend not to waste food, and he quipped, with a broad grin: “Now that you dislike waste, why don’t you eat my leftovers?”
I’m not that enlightened yet, but there are enlightened souls. Xinhua reported in October seven janitors at a university in Shandong Province had been eating students’ leftover food at a campus canteen since May in hopes of shaming them about waste. A few students had indeed taken the message and started eating everything on their plate, the news agency said.
‘Don’t talk’
Students are the future and journalists are the conscience of our society. But do all of them live up to what we expect of them? Surely not.
Confucius says: “Don’t talk while eating.” He also says: “However simple your food is, you should set aside some of it as holy sacrifice (to nature and to ancestors who first harvested food).”
On November 26, President Xi Jinping visited Qufu City, Confucius’ hometown, and encouraged an informed inheritance of traditional Chinese cultures. But for many, it’s easier to talk the talk than walk the walk. Some even put their lives at risk through waste.
On July 23, a forestry official in Heilongjiang Province squandered public money to entertain his boss. The official drank so much alcohol that he died the next day. Since the alcohol was partly made of rice, one can infer that he wasted both food (drinking more than he could digest) and public money.
Going to lunch at our canteen is much less dramatic than the drink-to-death story, but in both cases, I see lip service paid to saving food — a traditional Chinese virtue of frugality somehow lost in today’s melting pot of plenty.
(The name of this weekly column, The Way of Water, comes from the famous Taoist saying that “the ultimate good is the way of water.”)
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