What exactly are the questions surrounding convenience store suspended meals?

I first learned about Chen Xiaolei's book "Leftover Food" when I went to Hong Kong, China for a conference the year before last, and I thought of it again in connection with the recent "convenience store pay-it-forward meals."

In "Leftover Food," Chen Xiaolei starts from "kitchen waste," traces where kitchen waste comes from, and compares the different ways various countries handle it. In the book, Chen Xiaolei gives high praise to Taipei's "trash does not touch the ground" and "kitchen waste recycling" policies. I joked that she probably had not noticed the "singles discrimination" implicit in these policies, and she responded that she wrote it that way at the time simply to put some policy pressure on the Hong Kong, China government, and mentioned: "Last year I interviewed some cases of food waste in Taiwan, China and found many loopholes: for example, there is no reduction at the source, a large number of convenience stores, all-you-can-eat restaurants, and hypermarkets are all throwing away food, and of the kitchen waste that is recycled, only one tenth is reused, which is a fairly low proportion. Overall, the sorting and recycling in the middle is extremely careful, but neither the front end nor the back end gets any attention, and there are also groups following up on it. Looking at the private kitchen waste recycling trucks in Taipei City, there is a chance for tainted food and reused waste oil to appear. It would be great if a reporter in Taiwan, China would investigate and report on it."

Indeed, in "Leftover Food," Chen Xiaolei spends a great deal of space discussing the kitchen waste problem and food waste in restaurants, cafeterias, and supermarkets, but in Taiwan, China, similar discussions mostly stop at "the kitchen waste that people in the country waste in a year could be piled up into several Taipei 101s." Only CommonWealth Magazine, in April of this year, once analyzed both the front end of the food waste problem (from Xiluo Fruit and Vegetable Market to household refrigerators) and the back end (households, restaurants, all-you-can-eat buffets), and tried to elevate this issue to the level of "food education." Unfortunately, just as the CommonWealth report points out, the amount of kitchen waste we can see from the statistics is limited to the Environmental Protection Administration's recycling volume statistics and estimates inferred from waste composition analysis, and does not include the recycling volume of restaurants and buildings that commission private operators. And precisely because the statistics do not show the proportions that households, convenience stores, and restaurants account for in kitchen waste, the phrase "people in the country" instead shifts the social responsibility that enterprises ought to bear onto a faceless society (or even individuals).

What is worth observing is that in the CommonWealth report, the kitchen waste volume of all-you-can-eat restaurants and high-end hotels was specifically singled out, but another place for eating out that is closely tied to your and my daily life disappeared from the report, and that is the "convenience store."

In the recently popular reports about convenience stores providing pay-it-forward meals, the convenience store manager who launched this charitable action said: "In fact, the amount of fresh food that convenience stores discard every day is enormous." For the convenience store manager, pulling these soon-to-expire items back from the edge of the kitchen waste bin and turning them into pay-it-forward meal points is an act of kindness, but the more crucial question behind this statement is actually: "Why is so much left over?" If every convenience store has its proud "POS system" (Point of Sale) to analyze consumer behavior and product sales, then why does it still produce so much fresh food that cannot be sold?

Going further, although many reports have already told us that when convenience stores began selling boxed meals, what they were trying to break into was an away-from-home dining market worth hundreds of billions in business opportunities, not to mention that when convenience stores began selling vegetables, fruit, fresh produce, and other ingredients that we previously could only buy at traditional markets or supermarkets, Taiwan, China's convenience store operators had already become an enormous and flexible channel. These reports even tell us how much revolution the ingredient suppliers at the raw material end had to carry out in order to meet the needs of convenience store operators: "7-Eleven requires vegetable farmers to pre-cut according to regulations; the weight, length, and even color of a bunch of water spinach must all meet the requirements before it can be sent to the factory. Because of this, Taiwan, China gave rise to an industry that had never existed before -- vegetable cutting factories." But what these reports do not tell us is: how much kitchen waste do these vegetable cutting factories produce? How many national boxed meals sit idle on the shelves so that consumers can eat boxed meals 24 hours a day? And how many boxed meals are thrown into the kitchen waste bin after the mealtime period has passed and they have not been sold?

In other words, is it possible that hidden behind the phenomenon of these convenience store charitable pay-it-forward meals is actually excessive competition among convenience stores, excessive production of boxed meals, and food waste on a massive scale?

If so, then instead of treating convenience store pay-it-forward meals as a kind of "charity," shouldn't we face up to the capitalist crisis of "overproduction" behind them?

Even more, if we look at the "convenience store charitable pay-it-forward meal initiative" together with past events such as "President Chain Store convenience store outlets recycling kitchen waste to make organic fertilizer" and "New Taipei City cooperating with convenience stores to set up happiness stations for disadvantaged hungry children," is it possible that "how to deal with production waste?" has actually always been an operational anxiety for convenience store operators, only today wrapped in a moral discourse of social innovation, social responsibility, and charitable action to package the fact that convenience store operators overproduce and waste excessively in the process of selling fresh food?

If that is the case, then what we should do is probably not to sing the praises of convenience stores' charity and innovation, but rather, like tracking the tainted starch incident, to demand that convenience stores bear the responsibility they should bear for food waste.