Earlier this month, on October 16th, we celebrated World Food Day, a critical day on the UN calendar which celebrates the founding of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) in 1945 with the incredibly important mission of achieving food security for all.   

This year’s specific theme for World Food Day is powerful:  Right to foods for a better life and a better future.

And it could not be more timely. 

Because as the FAO notes, hunger remains stubbornly high.   While the world’s farmers produce more than enough food to feed the global population, more than 700 million global citizens are facing hunger and more than 2.8 billion are unable to afford a healthy diet.

And despite growing awareness in the past 10-15 years of the scope, scale and impact of global food loss and waste, along with a Sustainable Development Goal (Target 12.3) focused on halving global food waste by 2020 and reducing losses along food supply chains, roughly 40% of food production is lost or wasted annually to the enormous detriment of people and planet.

Further, despite the clear need for urgent action on food loss and waste reduction, the world is moving far too slowly – as highlighted by the Champions 12.3 group in last month’s 2024 Progress Report which provided this stark guidance:

This report shows that the world is at a fork in the road.  Unless a slew of companies prioritize food loss and waste reduction, we will have missed one of the best opportunities to build a resilient food system for generations.

It’s a clear warning, and a call for collaborative action on a nexus issue that can in turn accelerate progress on multiple Sustainable Development Goals. 

And as we know, halving global food waste is a critical pillar in the UNFAO’s effort to transform the global food system to successfully feed the planet within planetary boundaries by 2050.

But we need to move much faster on global food loss and waste reduction, and one of the points of prioritization in the U.S. and developed world countries must involve a change in culture regarding our valuation of food.  

Changing Mindsets, Changing Culture

For the last 15 years, food waste reduction leaders in the U.S. and abroad have advocated for raising awareness of the global food waste challenge and the tremendous opportunity it brings for social, environmental, and financial benefit, supplemented by broad and deep educational efforts in K-12 schools and multiple food sector segments regarding the need to properly value food resources and minimize food waste.   

There is broad recognition of the excessive and unsustainable costs of the developed world’s culture of abundance toward food which perpetuates a reinforcing cycle of overproduction and high levels of food loss and waste, as well as the need to move countries like the U.S. from a culture of abundance to a culture of responsibility toward food. 

Such a transition requires mindset change, whereby individuals properly value food and all of the resources that go into bringing our food to us each day, and where cultural norms engender a shift toward everyday food waste reduction behavior versus food wasting behavior.     

In the U.S., our main reference point for a culture of responsibility toward food is the War era, buoyed by posters from USDA and the War Department with messaging such as “Lick the Platter Clean – Don’t Waste Food” and “Food – Don’t Waste It.”  

It’s fascinating to periodically review these posters and reflect on the culture regarding food resources at the time.

Notably, one poster even contained an early reference to reducing plate waste, a topic that is now gaining much attention in the foodservice sector, advising “Some folks’ eyes are bigger than their stomachs – don’t waste food.”

Another War-era poster instructed individuals to Can and/or Dry Fruits and Vegetables, along with the message “Don’t Let Good Food Spoil.”  It also contained an educational element, noting that individuals could send for specific free Bulletins on canning and drying.

Other posters had a poignant message of self-sacrifice.  One included the word “Emergency” in bold red letters across the top, followed by the request: “To save wheat for our hungry friends in Europe, the Citizens Food Committee asks you to: 1) Use no meat on Tuesdays, 2) Use no poultry or eggs on Thursdays, 3) Save a slice of bread every day, and 4) Clean your plate at every meal.”  The final caption: “Save Wheat, Save Meat, Save The Peace.”  

Still another called on citizens to help feed hungry boys and girls by being a “food-saver” and joining “the clean plate club.”

These messages were highly specific action calls for a responsible culture that maximized the value of food resources at all times and minimized food waste.

And they were effective, tied to a larger wartime effort which required conservation of all types of resources in support of a greater global cause.

Beyond these many poster references to the responsible (frugal) nature of individuals during the two World Wars, many in the U.S. Baby Boomer generation were raised with the admonition to eat all of the food in front of them because there were starving people in other areas of the world.

While the War-era poster campaign and the stories and admonitions from responsible grandparents have receded in our memories, they contain valuable lessons for national educational efforts and campaigns to change our culture toward food from one of abundance to responsibility.  

And while we seek to harness these lessons, we should look to valuable ideas, concepts, and stories from other regions as well – hence the example below.

A Poetic Lesson from China

In my work, I am constantly looking for additional ideas and reference points to help lead the needed cultural shift from one of abundance and high waste of food to one of responsibility, with norms prioritizing minimal waste of food.

While covering this issue in my Fundamentals of Sustainability class recently, a powerful cultural example from China emerged, for which I thank several of my students who grew up in that country and shared the learning.

They pointed to a famous two-part poem written in 799 AD by Shen Li, a poet from the Tang Dynasty.  The poem is entitled Min Nong, which can be translated as “Commiserating with the Farmers” or “Pity the Peasants” or “Sympathy to the farmers.”  As Wentao Lyu noted in our class discussion, it is extremely well-known by Chinese citizens as it is one of the first poems to which they are introduced in early schooling. 

The students added that most individuals are more familiar with the second part of the poem, which can be translated as:

The Peasants (Part 2)

At noon they weed with hoes;

Their sweat drips on the soil.

Each bowl of rice, who knows?

Is the fruit of hard toil.

This poem clearly speaks to the importance of properly valuing food and all of the resources that go into it – particularly the hard labor of the farmers.  The word “toil” feels highly significant to me – along with the reference to the farmers’ sweat dripping on the soil – all encapsulated in a bowl of rice.  Other translations refer to the grains of rice (example: “how toilful each granule is”), communicating the extreme effort required by farmers to produce a very small amount of food.

The poem effectively conveys something that citizens in many developed world countries take for granted – the precious nature of our food and all of the resources involved in producing it and bringing it to our tables (especially the work of individual farmers).  There’s an important element of responsibility here – the idea of showing respect to those who toil hard to feed us.

It is a powerful concept.  My colleague Zhengxia Dou at the University of Pennsylvania mentioned that she knew the last two lines by heart, as they were drilled into her as a child.  She added that those two lines have been at the lips of every Chinese citizen for generations. 

And in the moment of our class discussion I realized the significance of the poem in that every student from China was well familiar with it, and to each of them the underlying message was normal.  One student noted that as a result of the poem, the concept of valuing food is well-rooted in Chinese culture.

Mingli Qi summarized it well:  This poem serves as a reminder of the tremendous amount of effort that farmers invest in producing the food. It highlights the labor and dedication behind each meal, urging us, as consumers, to be mindful and avoid wasting food. In the modern context of sustainability and avoiding food waste, it calls for a deeper appreciation of the resources and hard work that go into feeding us, encouraging more responsible food consumption.

Implications for Campaigns and Change

Reflecting on our class discussion and the poem, I find three very significant themes here:

  • the power of recognizing the hard toil of the farmers producing our food,
  • the emphasis on the value of small quantities of food (i.e. bowls and/or grains of rice),
  • and the power in educating children on the value of food at an early age.

And we should leverage all of these themes in future educational efforts to create a culture which properly values food and prioritizes behaviors to reduce food waste.

I was struck by the fact that all of the students in the class who grew up in China were familiar with the poem and the key message behind it.  It felt highly significant that the idea of being responsible with food out of respect for all of the work that went into bringing it to us was normal.  

On that theme of personal responsibility for reducing food waste, I’ll share three brief examples that converged in the ensuing discussions of the Chinese poem.

First, while discussing the poem with my colleague Zhengxia Dou, she described how as a child she was often tasked with separating the small stones from the rice her family had to eat.  And in so doing, she was instructed to capture every grain of rice that fell in the process out of respect for the value of those small pieces of food and out of responsibility to others.

Second, in his landmark book, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, Tristram Stuart tells the story of a lunch meeting with the owner of a pilau restaurant In China’s northwest city of Kashgar.  The owner, Abdul, was dismayed to see that Tristram had left “four or five stray grains of rice” that were stuck to the sides of the bowl and in the crevices of mutton bone.  Pointing to those few uneaten grains of rice, he posed a one word question as to why Tristram hadn’t consumed everything on his plate: “Clean?”

For Tristram, it was a powerful experience that revealed the deep cultural expectation among the Uighurs that individuals should finish every scrap of food that is on their plates, consistent with their belief that it is forbidden (haram) to waste food.  And as the world’s leading advocate for food waste reduction, the encounter left him feeling that he had been “thrashed” at his own game, as he would later describe in his TED talk. 

Third, in a recent piece in The Guardian (The scandal of food waste – and how we can stop it), Julian Baggini begins by noting that in traditional societies, little food goes to waste. He pointed to a Masai cattle herding community in Tanzania whose members were “outraged” at the idea of intentionally wasting food.  Significantly, some members of this group felt that wasting food was worse than killing a person, because while murder leads to one death, wasting food can result in several deaths.  Here again, the theme of responsibility to other community members is clear.

All three examples show the power of a cultural mindset that cherishes food and is intolerant of food waste, even in very small quantities.

In the U.S., we don’t have the cultural history dating back many centuries that yielded the poem Min Nong and its underlying concepts, but we do have very recent history of a War-era culture of responsibility toward food resources and a public educational campaign that served to reinforce that culture.

And there are lessons to be leveraged from both as we seek to create a culture of responsibility toward food in the U.S. through awareness campaigns and national educational efforts.

Further, the sense of shared sacrifice that underpinned the War-era culture of responsibility toward food is highly significant for us today.  Back then, Individuals committed to maximizing the value of food resources in line with a greater cause – supporting the troops and feeding those in need. 

A strong parallel can be made today: commitment to maximizing the value of food resources through reduction of overproduction, waste minimization, upcycling, and efficient sharing of excess food addresses critical causes of food security, climate change, and biodiversity loss.

The action steps that we all take today to reduce food loss and waste can be viewed as a shared sacrifice to fellow citizens and future generations.

And urgent action is essential, because the health of people and planet depends on rapid transformation to a sustainable, regenerative food system – and halving global food loss and waste is a critical component of that transition.

The bottom line, as I’ve covered often on this blog, is that progress on food waste reduction comes down to a simple concept: properly valuing our food and all of the resources go into bringing it to us.

The Chinese poem Min Nong, rich in history, poignantly illustrates this theme.

As noted, I was struck by the fact that all of my students from China knew of this poem from over 1,000 years ago, and how normal the message seemed to them.   

In the U.S., we had a culture that normalized food waste reduction less than 100 years ago.  In the post-War period we quickly moved away from it to a culture of abundance leading to excessive wase of food at great social and environmental cost.

We must strive to return to a culture of responsibility toward food through broad and deep educational efforts, including a national food waste reduction campaign drawing on effective lessons from history and other countries, supported by effective policies and legislation that promote waste reduction.

As the Champions 12.3 team noted in its 2024 Progress Report, we are at a fork in the road requiring that we prioritize action on global food loss and waste reduction.

Education to drive the change from a culture of abundance to a culture of responsibility toward food – to normalize food waste reduction behavior – is an essential point to prioritize.

Elevating themes of personal responsibility, shared sacrifice to a greater cause, respect for the “toil” of farmers, appreciation for even small amounts of food, and compassion for fellow citizens should all be part of those efforts.   

Returning to Tristram Stuart’s excellent TED talk, he noted that the above-mentioned lunch experience with the Uighur restaurant owner gave him faith that we “have the power to stop this tragic waste of resources if we regard it as socially unacceptable to waste food on a colossal scale…if we make noise about it, tell corporations about it, tell governments we want to see an end to food waste, we do have the power to bring about that change.”

He’s right.  We all have the power to contribute to an essential cultural transformation on food waste reduction by properly valuing food, influencing others, raising expectations of business organizations to demonstrate responsible actions toward food waste reduction, and supporting policymakers with appropriate legislation to reduce food waste and maximize the value of food resources.

And given the urgent need, we should embrace the opportunity.

*Thanks to my global students, including Mingli Qi and Wentao Lyu, for educating me on the poem Min Nong and its cultural importance.