Food waste is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry.– Pope Francis
Every day in Malaysia, almost 17,000 tonnes of food are thrown away. Not scraps. Not inedible remains. But perfectly edible nasi biryani, meat, vegetables, roti, fruits, kuih, and other cooked meals that are prepared with care, bought with money and produced with labour, only to be scraped into rubbish bins and sent to landfills.
Sixteen thousand six hundred and eighty-eight tonnes daily!
It is a number so large that it almost loses meaning until we pause to imagine what it represents. It is breakfast, lunch and dinner for millions of people. It is the difference between hunger and nourishment, between malnutrition and health, between despair and dignity. And yet, in one of the most food-abundant societies in our region, we discard this bounty as if it were worthless.
This is not just waste. It is a moral failure.
Social activist Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye has been warning us about this for more than a decade. He has described food wastage not merely as a social or moral issue, but as an environmental, economic and ethical crisis. He reminds us that much of what we throw away is entirely avoidable. Food that could have been eaten if only we planned better, portioned better, valued better.
His call for a Food Waste Reduction Act is therefore not about regulation for regulation’s sake. It is about forcing a society to confront its own excesses. It is about asking whether we are willing to continue living with a culture where abundance becomes arrogance, and convenience becomes carelessness.
Food waste is not just about what ends up in the bin. It is about the water used to grow that food, the energy used to transport it, the labour used to prepare it, the fuel used to refrigerate it, and the methane released when it rots in landfills. It is about forests cleared, rivers polluted, and carbon emissions released. And all for food that was never eaten!
But beyond the statistics, beyond the climate charts and policy debates, there is a deeper question: when did we stop respecting food?
I grew up in a different Malaysia.
My parents were not rich. My father was a government servant. My mother was a housewife who stretched every ringgit and every grain of rice. In the 1960s and 1970s in Sibu, when my siblings and I were young, two packets of kampua, or two packets of char kway teow, or mee goreng, or a simple fried rice, were shared among four children. My mother would divide the food carefully, fairly, lovingly. No one took more than their share. No one wasted a single strand of noodle.
If there were leftovers, they were kept and eaten later. If there was excess, our Malay neighbours were invited to share. Food was never treated as disposable. It was treated as a gift.
My mother’s constant reminder still rings in my ears: “Don’t waste food. It’s a sin! Think of the starving Africans.” It was not a slogan. It was a moral compass. Food, she taught us, is not merely fuel for the body. It is a blessing that carries the labour of farmers, the mercy of rain, the fertility of soil, and the grace of being able to eat when others, like our fellow Africans, cannot.
That lesson never left me. To this day, I only take what I can finish. I do not fill my plate for the sake of abundance. I do not confuse fullness with satisfaction.
Sadly, that restraint seems increasingly rare. Children, especially the affluent ones, are not taught by parents to avoid wastage.
One of the ugliest manifestations of our waste culture appears at buffets in hotels, restaurants, weddings and festive open houses. Plates are piled high not out of hunger, but out of impulse. Out of greed disguised as entitlement. Food becomes a symbol of status rather than sustenance. And when the appetite fails to match the portion, what remains is scraped away without a second thought.
I say this plainly: this is a moral sin. Not in the narrow religious sense alone, but in the ethical sense that it violates our responsibility to each other and to the planet. When we waste food knowingly, in a world where millions go hungry, we are not merely careless. We are unjust.
Some countries have understood this. In parts of Europe and East Asia, customers who take more than they can eat are charged for leftovers. In Japan, buffet culture is built around discipline and respect; take little, finish everything, return only if you are still hungry. The social expectation itself acts as regulation.
Malaysia, by contrast, has normalised excess.
We celebrate festivals like Hari Raya, Chinese New Year, Deepavali and Christmas with generosity, but often without wisdom. We cook too much, buy too much, display too much, and waste too much. We equate hospitality with excess rather than care. We measure success by how full the table looks, not by how little is thrown away.
It does not have to be this way. Reducing food waste does not require sacrifice. It requires awareness.
It begins with planning, knowing how many people we are feeding, what they actually eat, and how much is reasonable. It means resisting impulse buying, not shopping as if abundance itself were a virtue.
It means learning to use leftovers creatively instead of letting them die quietly at the back of the refrigerator. It means freezing excess, sharing surplus, donating unopened food, and composting scraps. Most of all, it means restoring a sense of reverence for food.
A grain of rice is not nothing. A slice of bread is not nothing. A bowl of soup is not nothing. Each represents a chain of life and labour that we are privileged to benefit from.
Lee is right to argue that education alone is no longer enough. After years of campaigns and appeals, food waste remains stubbornly high. That is why legislation now has a role to set targets, require reporting, incentivise donation, penalise excess, and push businesses and consumers toward responsibility.
But no law will work unless hearts change.
We must teach our children that leaving food unfinished is not normal. We must teach them that taking more than they need is not clever. We must teach them that waste is not invisible, that it travels from the plate to the landfill, from the landfill to the atmosphere, from the atmosphere to the climate that shapes their future.
We must also confront an uncomfortable truth: food waste is largely a problem of the comfortable. Those who know hunger rarely waste. Those who fear scarcity respect abundance. It is prosperity, when untempered by gratitude, that breeds carelessness.
Malaysia is blessed. We are peaceful, fertile, and food-secure compared to many parts of the world. But blessings carry responsibilities. If we cannot manage abundance ethically, then abundance becomes a curse. A society is not judged by how much it produces, but by how wisely it uses what it has.
The true measure of our civilisation is not the height of our buildings, the size of our buffets, or the variety of our dishes. It is whether we can sit at a full table and still remember those who have none. It is whether we can enjoy our prosperity without turning it into arrogance.
Food should humble us. Not inflate us. So the next time we stand before a buffet, before a festive spread, before a refrigerator full of choices, let us pause. Let us remember the farmer, the cook, the child who sleeps hungry elsewhere, and the planet that bears the cost of our excess.
Let us take only what we can finish; let us finish what we take. And let us finally treat food not as something to be wasted, but as something to be honoured.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at rajlira@gmail.com.
