Prosperity Without Excess: Creatively and Responsibly Reducing Food Waste This Lunar New Year

Author: Poorva Awasthi

Edited by TC Li

Image Source: Junliang Deng / Unsplash

In a few weeks, Hong Kong will be set abuzz with celebration, reunion, and generosity during the Lunar New Year. Hotels and restaurants take pride in offering abundant festive menus that symbolise prosperity, longevity, and good fortune. Yet this season of abundance also brings a familiar challenge: a significant increase in food waste, particularly from banquets, buffets, and over-prepared festive offerings.

Currently, Hong Kong produces 3,001 tonnes of food waste daily. As sustainability expectations rise and waste reduction is a strategic priority, the Lunar New Year presents an opportunity for hospitality professionals to rethink how the culinary symbol of abundance is delivered. Reducing food waste does not diminish guest experience; it can, in fact, enhance it by demonstrating responsibility, creativity, and care.

Why Festive Food Waste Matters

Food waste remains one of Hong Kong’s most pressing environmental challenges, accounting for 29% of the municipal solid waste (MSW). During festive periods, kitchens often overproduce to avoid shortages, while guests may order more than needed when joining in the spirit of abundance; even home cooks feel compelled to prepare more food than there are stomachs for, mortified if their feast doesn’t remotely epitomise all the wealth and prosperity to come. The result is excess food that cannot always be reused or donated.

The principles behind conscious cooking remind us that food waste is not only an environmental issue, but also a financial and operational one. Ingredients that end up discarded represent lost resources, labour, and cost. Addressing food waste, therefore, supports sustainability goals, operational efficiency, and overall organisational excellence.

Wisdom from the Kitchen: More Than Just Leftovers

When we talk about reducing food waste, we mean not just saving the wastage of ingredients, but also the nutritional value in the food we discard. For example, did you know that the leaves of the daikon radish – the most-often discarded part of the vegetable – may contain up to 2,300 times more cancer-prevention power than the root itself? Scientific research supports this notion: the leaves and greens of radish plants are rich in antioxidants, prebiotic compounds as well as nutrients that can support gut health and well-being, yet these parts are frequently binned. 

Across cultures, traditional food wisdom emphasises respect for every ounce of food. In many Indian households, food is revered as sacred, rooted in the idea that ‘Annam Brahma’ (Food is God), and that food should never be wasted. This belief underpins practices like reciting a meal prayer before eating, expressing gratitude for nourishment, and encouraging mindful consumption. 

The Indian ‘dadi-ma ke nuskhe’ (grandmother’s kitchen hacks) similarly embody sustainability:

• Vegetable peels and stems become stocks, chutneys or flavour bases

• Cooked rice transforms into savoury pancakes

• Leftover lentils become parathas or snacks

• Ripe fruit becomes quick jams or smoothies

  
  

These practices not only turn ‘waste’ into a resource, but also reduce disposal burden and encourage curiosity in food and our diet by celebrating the nutritional value and health benefits of each food ingredient.

In Chinese culture, too, food carries a deeply rooted significance. From the Chinese Winter Solstice dinner to traditional community feasts like ’Poon Choi’, food is often deemed a symbol of love, joy, and reunion, emphasising shared meals and gratitude for food and ancestors, reflecting an ethos that food is to be shared and honoured rather than being lightly discarded. 

On a practical level, food shavings and trimmings that are safe and clean can be repurposed beyond the kitchen. Many households and small farms use vegetable scraps as animal feed or compost inputs, closing the loop organically and locally, and preventing usable nutrients from ending up in landfills.

Professionalising Kitchens with Traditional Wisdom

Traditional kitchen wisdom is rooted in respect for food and the growers, thoughtful preparation, and maximising the potential of the food ingredient. Recall the time you learnt from your parents or grandparents to save tangerine peel as a mosquito repellent, blitz up stale bread to be used as panko for deep frying, or make a natural plant fertiliser with banana peel and water. These same principles are directly applicable to professional kitchens as well.

For hotels and restaurants, reducing food waste is not about compromising on quality; it is about better planning, smarter preparation, and skilful utilisation of ingredients across their lifecycles. When kitchens treat trimmings, surplus, and by-products as resources rather than waste, they unlock opportunities to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and strengthen their sustainability credentials, all while meeting guests’ expectations for abundance and quality during festive periods.

This mindset shift provides the foundation for practical, scalable actions in hospitality settings, and there are practical steps to take to create and maintain a low-waste operation.

Practical Steps for Hotels and Restaurants

1. Design Menus with Flexibility in Mind: Festive menus should be planned to allow cross-utilisation of ingredients across dishes. This reduces spoilage risk and enables kitchens to repurpose safely stored surplus into staff meals or next-day offerings where appropriate.

2. Rethink Buffet and Banquet Service: Smaller-batch cooking with more frequent replenishment helps maintain visual abundance without overproduction. Made-to-order stations and plated service options can further reduce food waste while preserving guest choice.

3. Empower Kitchen Teams Through Training: Equipping culinary teams with skills to creatively reuse trimmings, peels, and surplus ingredients turns waste reduction into a professional competency rather than a constraint.

4. Strengthen Food Donation Partnerships: Where regulations permit, surplus food that meets safety standards can be channelled to food rescue organisations to ensure the 1.65 million Hongkongers living under the poverty line have access to good-quality, nutritious food.

5. Engage Guests Through Thoughtful Communication: Simple cues, such as offering takeaway options for untouched food, or educational posters on food waste and its social and environmental impact, can incentivise guests to make waste reduction a daily habit.

   
   

A More Meaningful Celebration

Lunar New Year is a celebration of renewal, gratitude, and shared prosperity. For the hospitality sector, reducing food waste is a natural extension of these values. It reflects respect for food, for the people who grow and prepare the food, and for the resources that make celebration possible.

Festive abundance does not need to be measured by the quantity of food served. Instead, it can be defined by the quality of the feast: how thoughtfully food is sourced, planned, prepared, and shared. When hotels and restaurants adopt mindful menu design, intentionally design waste out of the kitchen and dining proper, empower kitchen teams with creative reuse skills, and engage guests in responsible dining, they demonstrate leadership that goes beyond compliance or cost savings.

Across cultures, long-standing traditions remind us that food is never just a commodity. Whether through practices of shared feasts or beliefs that regard food as sacred, there is a common understanding that wasting food is not only morally wrong but that it diminishes the value of food. 

As the hospitality industry looks ahead to a more sustainable future, the Lunar New Year offers a powerful moment to lead by example, not least by transforming cultural wisdom into professional practice. By embracing conscious cooking and reducing food waste, hospitality businesses can celebrate prosperity in its truest form: one that nourishes people, communities, and the planet alike.

We encourage you to consider including the Quick Wins below in the daily runs of your home kitchen, restaurants, or bars. You will find more inspiration for creative food reduction in Conscious Cooking – Asian Delights, a cookbook featuring 20 recipes from nine of Hong Kong's top chefs passionate about reducing food waste, food-saving expert Carla Martinesi of food waste reduction app CHOMP, and students from The University of Hong Kong, from a collaborative project led by The University of Hong Kong School of Biological Sciences and we at GREEN Hospitality.

Why not gift the cookbook to your family and friends this Lunar New Year and start the Year of the Horse with a more mindful approach to how you cook and consume food? By purchasing the cookbook, you can not only share sustainable cooking tips with your kitchen staff or friends, but you will also support Foodlink’s ongoing work in reducing food waste and hunger in Hong Kong. 

Quick Wins: Turning Food Scraps Into Value

Think twice before throwing food away – the most discarded parts often hold the most nutritional value

🥬 Radish Greens and Vegetable Tops

• Leaves of the daikon radish, commonly used to make the Chinese radish cake for Lunar New Year, can contain significantly higher antioxidant and protective compounds than the root itself.

• Use them in stir-fries, soups, pestos, or dals instead of discarding. You may even turn radish leaves into a condiment to add flavours to rice, pasta, or toast.

• Wash thoroughly and cook like spinach or mustard greens.

  
  

🥕 Peels, Stems, and Trimmings

• Carrot, beetroot, pumpkin, and gourd peels can be turned into stocks, chutneys, or flavour bases.

• Onion skins, vegetable ends, and cheese rinds add depth to broths when simmered and strained. Incidentally, onion skins (and many other vegetables and fruits) can be used as a natural dye.

  
  

🍚 Cook Once, Eat Twice

• The chicken, fish, and vegetables served as a Lunar New Year family gathering can be saved and used to make fried rice later.

• Leftover rice can be used to make fried rice, congee, or savoury pancakes.

• Transform cooked lentils into parathas, fritters, or soups the next day.

  
  

🐄 Feed, Compost, or Return to the Soil

• Clean vegetable trimmings can be used as animal feed (where appropriate).

• Inedible scraps can be composted, returning nutrients to the soil instead of landfill.

• In case you cannot compost your food waste, consider subscribing to the food waste collection and processing services offered by Eco Community Promotion Association Limited (ECPAL), which delivers food waste to O.Park1, the city’s first organic waste treatment facility that converts food waste into sustainable energy and compost.

  
  

🙏 Food as a Value, Not a Commodity

• The Lunar New Year is typically a time when food waste would spike because of the belief that having ‘surplus’ or more than enough is considered key to a comfortable life of prosperity in the year ahead. With food waste becoming a crisis globally and locally, it is our responsibility, whether as a hospitality practitioner or layperson, to ensure that surplus is repurposed or shared, especially with the people in need. 

  
  

Reducing food waste is not about eating less but using food more mindfully and wisely.