Fight against “food waste”
Restaurants impose fines if guests don’t finish their plates
A chef in a restaurant. If you don’t eat everything, you risk a fine.
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Food waste is a real nuisance. Restaurant owners feel the same way: If you don’t eat your plate empty, you have to pay a fine in several restaurants.
“What’s on the plate has to be eaten”, “If you don’t finish the plate, the sun won’t shine tomorrow” or “Your eyes were probably bigger than your stomach” – such sayings are probably mainly known from childhood . In several restaurants, however, they are now catching up with adults again. If you order there and don’t eat everything, you have to expect penalties.
In Switzerland, for example, the “Casanova” restaurant in Aargau already announced last year that guests there would have to expect a fine of five francs for plates that were not completely eaten. The reason: at the all-you-can-eat buffet, guests would always take more than they actually ate. Some guests would leave the food to try another dish.
The restaurant owner there, Salman Ghauri, comes from India and is familiar with the problems of food shortages there. He finds it annoying that his guests in wealthy Switzerland order more than they eat: “Food is valuable in India, you don’t throw it away,” as he told the “Aargauer Zeitung”. He has not yet imposed the penalty, but has issued several warnings. According to Ghauri, most of his guests like the concept.
Food waste: costs several thousand euros
This attitude has meanwhile arrived in Germany as well: as in the Fang restaurant in the district of Leer. The Asian restaurant also knows the problem with the all-you-can-eat offer all too well. According to restaurant manager Zi Ye, many guests would fill their plates full but then leave some leftovers. For Ye, this is not just an ethical problem: According to “NDR”, the restaurant has to throw away food worth around 2,000 to 3,000 euros a month.
Signs in the restaurant now warn of the penalty and point out that it is better to open up more than to waste food. Sounds easy, but it still doesn’t go down well with all customers: Ye is generous with the interpretation of his punishment. Anyone who at least tries a full plate does not have to pay the fine. But guests would have already achieved even this minimum goal: A woman even refused to touch her food in the restaurant. When she didn’t want to pay the fine either, Ye said her whole table was banned from the house. This one table alone left 50 liters of waste.