The Big Story: Big plates

Should the government get restaurants to define portion sizes?

On Monday, Union Minister for Food and Consumer Affairs, Ram Vilas Paswan, told the Hindustan Times that his ministry will soon hold a meeting of representatives from the restaurant industry to consider a standard for food portions.

The move was inspired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s comments on his Mann Ki Baat radio show on April 9, when he complained about the amount of food being wasted across the country.

Paswan indicated that some restaurants might be serving more than what a customer could eat. “Why serve four idlis when a person can eat only two?” he asked. He told NDTV: “I noticed when I went to restaurants that food was being wasted. We cannot see this happening in a country where there are so many poor. I asked the industry and restaurants to come for meeting and discuss if there is any legal provision to fix portions.”

This isn’t a trivial problem. In a country where almost half the population lives below or just above the poverty line, the large-scale wastage of food is a moral dilemma. This was probably what led Modi to made his comments.

But is the retail food sector the ideal place to start?

While the government wants restaurants to define food portions and could possibly devised standardised labels for the entire country, the fact is that food wastage is much higher at the production and distribution levels than at the retail stage in restaurants.

Between 2013 and 2015, around 40,000 tonnes of foodgrains were wasted in Food Corporation of India godowns. India still lacks a robust network of cold storage, resulting in large quantities of perishables getting spoilt while they are being transported from farm to market.

In this context, the government’s idea to begin with the retail food sector looks like an attempt to shrug off its burden of fighting a serious structural issue and make the commercial sector responsible for it. To tackle the problem, it should consider the grain, not the chaff.

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