Thirteen National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee 28th meeting voted to adopt Anti-Food Waste Law on the 29th, which will come into effect from the date of publication. The law stipulates that businesses can be fined up to 10,000 yuan (RMB, the same below) for inducing and misleading consumers to over-order; food producers and operators can be fined up to 50,000 yuan for serious wastage; and producers and publishers can be fined up to 100,000 yuan for disseminating binge-drinking and overeating video programs.

How do you feel about the anti-food waste law?

I think the anti-food waste law is well intentioned, but its actual implementation should encounter many obstacles. The main one is that I think how to judge whether an order is wasteful or not? It's hard to know if everyone has eaten at every restaurant, and it's hard to know if everyone knows what's good or not! Even if I order too much food, can I pack it? That's definitely allowed. What if I meet someone who doesn't want to pack? If you spend money on the food you ordered and then have to pay for it when you can't finish it, that's something that no one would feel comfortable with! So I think the food waste law needs to be improved, and we need to practice to know if it will work or not!

What will happen if the anti-food waste law is passed?

First of all, this law was enacted mainly in response to those videos on the internet that show people eating all kinds of things, which are not eaten in real life, but are only edited later to achieve the effect. These videos often result in a large amount of food waste, so I think this anti-food waste law was enacted to target this category of people. The main thing is to change the status quo of the internet eating and broadcasting a lot of wasted things.

How do you define obvious waste?

To be honest, how to define the phenomenon of obvious waste is not clearly delineated in the anti-food waste law, which is too ambiguous and not clearly written at all. What are the penalties for violations? How to resolve disputes between consumers and restaurants? All these issues are not clearly spelt out! So I can't help but wonder, can this law be enforced? And even if it is, for how long? Wasting food is a moral issue in itself, and if you want to solve it by legal means, it really costs a lot of money.