Cleaners happy to eat students' leftover food

Seven cleaners at Yantai University's dining hall in Shandong province are eating the leftovers that students leave behind on their plates, in a bid to discourage food waste.

With a sign hung above the fourth-floor No.7 dining hall that reads "Each bowl of rice and porridge is hard-earned," the staff began the initiative five months ago, picking at the rice and steamed buns that go uneaten by the students.

Wu Minghua, a 62-year-old retired teacher on a pension who now works as a cleaner at the school, carries plastic bags with him when clearing out the trays of food in the dining hall, saying that he packs up all the left-behind rice and buns. After the students have returned to class, the cleaners sit down to their meal - the uneaten food collected from lunchtime.

Wu said that it's not humiliating to eat the leftover food since he sees the students as his children - and he always eats his children's leftovers.

"My generation lives a frugal life, not like younger generations who live a consumer-oriented one," he said.

Another one of the cleaners at the dining hall, a woman surnamed Ding, admitted that when her daughter, a third-year student at the university, found out she was eating the leftover food, she demanded that her mother stop, worried about germs.

But Ding said that there's nothing wrong with the leftovers and that it would only be a waste to throw the uneaten food away.