Govt to ask restaurants to reduce portions to battle food wastage

The NDA government is preparing to fix portion sizes of dishes served by star hotels and restaurants, a fortnight after Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed concern about wastage of food in his monthly Mann Ki Baat radio programme.

As per reports in Hindustan Times, Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, said, “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.”

The report added that the ministry was drafting a questionnaire for hotels and restaurants to explain what dish sizes they should serve to a customer.

“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),” Paswan added.

In his Mann Ki Baat last month, Modi had flagged the issue of food wastage at feasts and termed it as injustice to the poor.

Food wastage and subsequently food shortage has been a huge problem in India. According to the 2013 Global Hunger Index (GHI), India ranks 63rd, out of the 78 hungriest countries, significantly worse than neighboring Sri Lanka (43rd), Nepal (49th), Pakistan (57th), and Bangladesh (58th). 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% 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.
As per a 2014 World Economic Forum report, food worth $8.3 billion, or nearly 40% of the total value of annual production in India, is wasted.

"This does not capture the full picture: for example, meat accounts for about 4% of food wastage but 20% of the costs, while 70% of fruit and vegetable output is wasted, accounting for 40% of the total cost," the report added.

A September 2016 government report said that the amount of food wasted in India can feed all of Bihar for a year.