抽朽朽杳屎

Amidst all the talk about Hong Kong’s excessively wasteful lifestyle when it comes to handling food, it is nice to know a group of people are doing something apart from just harping about it. Foodlink is a small charity founded in 2001 and whose goal is to fight hunger and poverty by minimizing food wastage. What a noble cause indeed. As I learned in the news that there are several cases of massive fish kill in the Philippines, one can understandably feel sad about it while many people struggle to secure food on their tables.
In Hong Kong, food waste isn’t caused by massive fish kills – blamed on sudden changes in water temperature and low oxygen concentration – but by lavish lifestyles. Patrons at buffet dinners or wedding banquets are often served with excessive amounts of food to portray abundance and positive impression. Yet a significant portion of these servings end up in the rubbish bins. On average, 2,995 tonnes of food waste are disposed of at landfills each day and each Hong Kong resident produces 921 kilograms of waste a year.
As much as we would like to instill discipline to food managers at restaurants and hotels, I highly appreciate the efforts of Foodlink not only to mitigate food waste, but more importantly to provide meals to the needy. Foodlink takes leftover food from hotels and restaurants and delivers it to charity groups that deal with the less privileged members of society.
“We used to only have two beneficiaries that we’d deliver food to, but now we have 13. We also only used to have three sponsors that would give us food and now we have 23,” Robin Hwang, fundraising director for Foodlink, said.
“We’ve also a waiting list of hotels and clubs who are prepared to give us their food, so we’ve grown significantly.”
Foodlink’s donors include Island Shangri-La, Prêt à Manger and The Langham Hong Kong, who donate their surplus food and sent to organizations such as Home of Love in Sham Shui Po and Action Care who prepare food to needy recipients. Leftover food is collected from the breakfast and dinner buffets from Mondays to Saturdays. With less than a dozen staff members, mostly volunteers, the group is open to accepting those who share the same noble vision.
While honor and appreciation mainly goes to the founders of Foodlink Foundation who hatched the idea and kept it going, although interrupted, for the past decade, the operation wouldn’t be complete without the cooperation of donors. Therefore, we’re also grateful to donors and partner agencies (complete list) who join this effort.