‘Eat what you order’ to curb food wastage: Is Modi government our nanny?
After the diktat saying no alcohol within 500 metres of a national highway, the central government it seems is preparing to “fix portion size of dishes served by star hotels and restaurants”, according to a new report in the Hindustan Times. Apparently, this imminent move is the government’s way of tackling food wastage and shortage in the country.
The Union minister of consumer affairs, food and public distribution and the Lok Janshakti Party leader, Ram Vilas Paswan, said this while making the government’s intentions evident: “If a person can eat only two prawns, why should he or she be served six? If a person eats two idlis, why serve four! It’s wastage of food and also money people pay for something that they don’t eat.”
Intriguingly, the minister added:
“They are the experts. They should tell us the maximum amount of a dish a person can eat. You go to a Chinese restaurant; they give you so much (of food). We are going to call them (stakeholders) for a meeting. The PM is concerned about food wastage and so we are going to issue instructions to these hotels (about the amount of food to be served).”
A further clarification came that the imminent instructions would be applicable to “standard hotels” and not dhabas (streetside eateries on the highways and low-end diners in cities), which “usually serve thalis”.
Interestingly, this is part of a slew of “consumer-centric proposals that the ministry has incorporated in a new draft Bill to amend the Consumer Protection Act.
Who moved your plate?
While the contents of the amendment Bill, which is under the law ministry at present, need close perusal, it’s important that the latest move to determine how much an adult citizen of India wants to eat and order at a hotel or restaurant is scrutinised adequately. Is this a worthwhile measure to curb food wastage in the hotel and restaurant sector, or is it one more attempt on the part of the central government to try and control every minutiae of the citizens’ private lives?
That food gets wasted in the “standard hotels” of the country is surely a bitter truth. But mostly privately run hotels have sound economics of how much will be used per day dpending on the footfall and other counts. While green norms to have differently sized portions have been talked about for a while now, several restaurants themselves have taken measures to recycle the edibles and distribute the perishables among charities. In fact, a norm to make perishables available for the poor and needy in case they are reaching their expiry date would be a great start.
 |
| Photo: Nirvana Restaurant |
But the standard hotel and restaurant sector is a small portion of India’s staggering food and agriculture sector. In fact, the biggest reason behind India’s enormous food loss isn’t the callous customer at a standard hotel but the losses incurred during food transport and storage, that is within the supply chain.
Rotten truth
The colossal wastage of food in India, a country that produces surplus food in terms of cereals, pulses, vegetables and dairy/poultry products, is chiefly because of the acute lack of proper storage and transport infrastructure. Report after report has underlined the importance of cold storage and refrigeration on the farms themselves, while investing in transport facilities that have adequate preservation techniques in-built.
India wastes about 67 million tonnes of food items every year, that’s more than the national average of Britain, and enough to feed the whole of Bihar, one of the most populous states of the country, for a whole year.
The value of food lost is Rs 92,000 crores, or about two-third of the cost to feed India’s 600 million poor under the National Food Security Act. This means, if there has to be measures taken, it must be at the supply chain and public distribution level, and not really policing the contents of an adult citizen’s plate of prawns or chicken nuggets.
Because the wastage happens because of improper handling, lack of farm training and smart, optimised farming, this is where the government should ideally focus its energies. Measures such as standardised food sorting practices, investing in an ideal combination of mechanised and labour-intensive farm operations to allow employment opportunities to India’s debt-ridden, drought-stricken farmers, better water harvesting and preventing land degradation from wasteful agro practices should be what the government must spend its wonderful and initiatives on.
Key facts on food loss and waste you should know
 |
| Photo: Screengrab/Food and Agriculture Organisation, United Nations |
No country for the hungry
In the 2013 Global Hunger Index, India is at a whopping 63rd position out of 78 poor and malnourishment-battling countries. To add insult to injury, Indis is behind Pakistan (57th), Sri Lanka (43rd), Nepal (49th) and Bangladesh (58th) in the list. That’s a scathing indictment of India’s pretensions to being a superpower whose time has come. Almost 600 million people are poor and about 20 crore, or 200 million go hungry to sleep on any given night.
According to the report, the situation has improved somewhat but much remains to be done.
“Despite India’s considerable improvement over the past quarter-century – its GHI rating has risen from 32.6 in 1990 to 21.3 in 2013 – the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization believes that 17 per cent of Indians are still too undernourished to lead a productive life. In fact, one-quarter of the world’s undernourished people live in India, more than in all of Sub-Saharan Africa.”
Canny state, not nanny state
In such a context, while controlling the affluent citizen’s plate size and telling him/her what to eat might make for a strictly moral case, it’s hardly the conduct of a mature government. If it really wants to curb wastage at the user end, it is more advisable to run a string of awareness campaigns in the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan grain, to inculcate the spirit of not wasting any food among Indians.
Instead of issuing diktats that “fixing” the maximum amount a person can eat out while paying for the same item, espousing India’s age-old wisdom from the times of Ramayana and Mahabharata can be used to instill a sense of food security at the individual and social commitment.