Waste watching

People the world over want to create new records for all kinds of reasons, but here in China the Guinness authority 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 "catching 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 Chinese felt doing it-but found justification in the American precedent.

China in its thousands of years of history goes 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 showoff one's wealth determines how much is properly consumed and how much thrown away as garbage.