Dishing The Dirt On Banquet Waste
Writers spill the beans after working as part-time waitresses at four hotels
Left behind: Unfinished ee-fu noodles form the bulk of banquet waste, followed by starchy desserts and prawn shells.
AT TRADITIONAL Chinese banquets, nine-course meals are a norm. After all, food in abundance signifies good hosting skills and prosperity.
Realistically however, such banquets are largely a social platform where old classmates, relatives and colleagues get busy showing off their bling or playing catch up.
The nine-course meal? A mere time filler.
“You want to know how much waste there is? Go to any hotel function and see for yourself,” challenged chef Joseph Quek, 42, who has been working in the food industry for 25 years.
And so we did.
Under aliases, we took part-time jobs as banquet waitresses to investigate the scale of food wastage at these feasts.
Prior to that, we checked ourselves into an established hospitality training school in Outram and took typhoid jabs, a compulsory vaccination for all food handlers in Singapore that prevents diseases from food or water contamination.
The crash-course four-hour training we received from the school was barely relevant to what the job entailed. The first two hours involved lots of waiting, verifying of our identities and pedalling of the banquet uniform (the quintessential black skirt and pants).
When the real training eventually commenced, we were taught banquet jargon and how to converse with guests in proper English (for the benefit of the group who consisted of 90 per cent Chinese nationals). As it turned out, those were merely peripheral knowledge compared to the trick of the trade – food portioning.
ONE CHINESE WEDDING DINNER GIVES RISE TO FIVE BUCKETS OF FOOD WASTE?!!!!
Shocking. Really.
And seriously, who wants to sign an indemnity form just to tapau!? That’s unheard of.
Any thoughts anyone on how to reduce food wastage if you are the one tasked to organise such events? Be it your own wedding, your company’s D&D or other celebratory functions?
Reducing food wastage starts from controlling the amount of food that goes on the plate. We can do so by asking ourselves if there really is a need to have 8 or 10-course meals at the chinese banquet. By my observations, diners start rejecting food after the 5th course as they are already full. As for other celebratory functions, it is important to bear in mind that guests are mostly there for socialisation and not to eat.
Agreed. I feel that people in affluent countries don’t place any thought to how much they can eat just because they can afford to. I think the best solution for chinese style banquet is to portion the food for individuals before serving (of course, ask who wants the next course too). That way only those who want more will get food, and you won’t need to serve those who are full or do not like the next dish.
Seriously, this is bad, seriously bad. If they know what it feels like to be those who have no food to eat, I wonder what would they do. I am so sad at the thought about the food wastage, if all the food wasted were to combined together, I guess, it can feed those that are suffering from hunger for years to come. In the future, if I have a restaurant, I would wanna people to pay for their food wastage and use the money to buy food for the poor.
so whats the sollution to this
Wow, can’t believe the amount of waste you found. truly shocking and upsetting. What can we do about it though?
Very insightful. Indian weddings (including mine) come to mind where diners are usually stuffed halfway down the meal. As you had mentioned in one of the earlier comments, the best way to do this is to limit wedding meals to a few courses – you end up getting better food quality and save yourself excessive calories + food waste.