Rice capades

When fried rice is served not to appease hunger but to create a record, food waste is almost unavoidable. With sights just on world records, people will go for such titles, forgetting their real meaning

On Oct 22, a new guinness world record was set in Yangzhou in East China's Jiangsu province: for "the largest serving of fried rice". Four days later, the record was revoked amid torrents of public criticism and media reports.

The reason? At least some of the 4,192 kilograms of fried rice was wasted. Even though the organizers admitted only 150 kg of the rice was "improperly disposed of", the remainder was unaccounted for. It was supposed to have been distributed to schools, but no evidence was forthcoming.

According to one estimate, the cost of the 4-metric-ton plus portion would be 140,000 yuan ($22,200) and, if sold at the market price, would fetch several times that amount. Guinness cites its principle that no food be wasted as the reason for nullifying the new record.

But I guess few Chinese people would have been surprised that a significant amount of food was simply trucked away as trash. It would have been more troublesome for the organizers to hand it out to those who needed it. As for selling it either at cost or with a reasonable profit margin, they couldn't care less because the event is at its core a non-commercial one.

Waste watching

People the world over want to create new records for all kinds of reasons, but here in China the Guinness authorities must have found the perfect match between the titles it bestows and the mentality of the people who covet them.

Many of the categories hold special allure for local governments and organizations who want to win bragging rights for whacky achievements. It is like "keeping up with the Joneses", ratcheted up to unhealthy proportions.

As I see it, Guinness feats should be conducted in the spirit of fun and collective enjoyment. Using public resources entails waste at its origin. If the World Association of Chinese Cuisine and the Songjiacheng Sports and Leisure Park, two organizations behind the fried-rice record quest, could find sponsors and did not care whether the food went down the drain, some other organizations with deeper pockets could easily trump them and double the amount of rice fried mainly for the eyes of the Guinness officials. There would be no end in sight until a higher level of government came out and put a stop to it.

It is essentially a competition of who can waste more money, which reminds me of a true story from the early 1990s about two nouveau-riche guys in an I-dare-you game with each lighting up a 100-yuan note until one gave up.

There are two issues involved in the fried-rice scandal. The public was angered by the waste of food, which nowadays is easy to track with the convenience of mobile gadgets and citizen journalism. But even without food waste, pursuits such as the largest serving of fried rice are questionable. The participants are pushed to ludicrous lengths by the halo of Guinness certification.

Food waste exists everywhere. In China, the most guilty venue is the restaurant, which is reported to collectively squander an amount that could feed some 200 million people. Even though the United States probably wastes more per person, I admire the American custom of using doggy bags to take home the leftovers. I still remember the mid-1980s, when such practices were first introduced to China and how awkward the Chinese felt doing it - but found justification in the American precedent.

China in its thousands of years of history has gone through cycles of abundance and starvation. Frugality is held up as a virtue as evidenced by a Tang Dynasty limerick that is drummed into every schoolchild. It is about the hard labor of farmers in producing grains. "Farmers weeding at noon, Sweat down the field soon. Who knows food on a tray, Thanks to their toiling day."

The tug-of-war between such early child education and the urge to show off one's wealth determines how much is properly consumed and how much is thrown away as garbage.

Showing off

The need for pomposity, however, underlies many decisions that on the surface are celebratory of human achievements but are in actuality hints of insecurity and a lack of self-confidence.

Why does Yangzhou need this title? The namesake fried rice is served in Chinese restaurants across the world. It is probably better known than the Singapore or Hainan variant.

On the other hand, touting Yangzhou fried rice may not be able to help its tourism simply because it is available everywhere and people do not need to travel there for a taste. The same is true of brand names, like Xerox and Hoover, that were so popular they turned into generic verbs.

Titles that include words such as "best", "longest", "tallest" and "largest" have special appeal to local authorities, who feel the pressure of being drowned out by competition. Granted, the first to win such a title gains indisputable publicity. But once such titles and certificates are handed out like Christmas cards, they function mostly as self-congratulatory items.

Almost every organization in China can produce a dozen plaques with all varieties of claims to accomplishments. Sometimes they fill up a whole wall or form a vertical column at the main entrance of an office. Then, someone notices that big-name international companies don't do such things, which makes such flaunting look somewhat boorish. This is just like a celebrity who lists only his or her name, sometimes only the first name, such as Beyonce, and a no-name person whose card lists two dozen titles.

Guinness says it rejects 90 percent of applications annually. In China it should probably adopt policies that take into account the allocation of public resources as an ethical concern. Its swift rescinding sent the right message, that it won't tolerate even a small amount of food waste. But it needs to look at some of the fundamentals behind the applicants' zeal and determine whether its certificates eventually serve the public good or only the interests of some title-coveting, ego-massaging officials.

Contact the writer at raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 11/06/2015 page30)