Waste not, want not

As a restaurant manager of a four-star hotel in Beijing, 33-year-old Zhao Yu feels like he could be hit by lightning on any given day because his restaurant throws away too much untouched food.

"When I was a little boy, my mother often warned me that wasting food is a sin and people would be punished by being hit by lightning," Zhao said.

The approximately 8 million metric tons of food protein and 3 million tons of fat that is wasted in China each year, according to data from the China Agricultural University, would be enough to feed nearly 200 million people.

It was this waste which drove 43-year-old Xu Zhijun to launch the "empty plate" campaign.

In order to cut the waste from tables across China, Web users have begun posting photos of finished dishes online and restaurants have started to serve half-sized dishes and free packages for take-away leftover food to show their support.

Some scientists and legal experts have even gone so far as to suggest criminalizing food waste.

Zhao however, believes that there will also need to be action in terms of official banquets, which he says are responsible for large amounts of wasted food.

"This bad culture of waste has persisted in China as more people got rich. Corruption and vanity have changed most people's eating habits," Xu told the Global Times on Tuesday.

He also added that if the campaign could expand to the government level, not only would corruption be reduced, the country could worry less about food security and the environmental costs that are incurred when dealing with kitchen wastes.

Corruption and vanity

Xu, who is also a vice president of the China Land Source Newspaper under the Ministry of Land Resources, launched the campaign in April 2012, but received limited attention at the time. Things changed when national media including China Central Television and the Xinhua News Agency reported on the campaign in the wake of the unveiling of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee's "eight-point plan" to combat bureaucracy and formalism, which included high-profile measures to combat the luxury banquets of officials.

As far as Xu is concerned, the transformation from a non-government campaign to one with government support highlights the large amount of food wasted at luxury banquets.

"The fight against food waste by officials is a fight against corruption," he said.

From Zhao's observations, officials' dinners are usually booked in advance in a private room and the average spending is around 800 yuan ($128.5) per person. Usually the government departments' names are printed on the invoices for reimbursement.

"During friends' gatherings and family reunion dinners people order less food and cheaper dishes, as well as take away the leftovers, but when it's a business dinner involving businessmen and officials most dishes aren't even touched as they're busy talking and drinking," Zhao said.

A government employee with the Shanghai Municipal Government told the Global Times that since the money spent on luxury food can be reimbursed with public funds after labeling them office expenses for stationary or other made-up items, officials do not care about waste.