Once the revelries end, reality hits. As guests at weddings leave the venue, organisers are usually left staring at mounds of food that will most likely be discarded.
But there are good souls such as Yuvraj M. and Shivakumar Bhadraiah, who are ready to drop what they’re doing to take the food to the city’s less privileged. In the past four years, Mr. Yuvraj, a marketing professional, has been taking time off from his day job to shuttle surplus food from wedding halls to construction sites, slums and railway stations. He focusses around west Bengaluru, Chamarajpet and Basavanagudi.
- Registered wedding halls in Bengaluru: 530
- Number of weddings annually: 85,000
- Unserved food estimates: 943 tonnes
- Cost of unserved food: ₹339 crore
- Source: Study by University of Agricultural Sciences, 2012
If the wedding is in the morning, he ferries the food to construction sites. If it’s an evening event, he transports the food to railway stations. The transportation charge is borne by Lions Club.
Velangani, a domestic help who works at a construction site at Gavipuram, is one of the beneficiaries of this service. “We cannot afford food like this,” she said.
A guest can eat around 500 g of food at an event, but the host serves up to 1,500 g, said Mr. Yuvraj, who gets more than 10 calls a day to pick up surplus food. “Why should we let food go waste when there are many starving a few kilometres away?” he said.
For the past 16 years, Mr. Bhadraiah, who owns a betel nut and banana leaf shop in Rajajinagar, has been re-routing food from feasts to the poor. Observing the dichotomy of rampant poverty and gratuitous portions of food being served at weddings, he came to the conclusion that “we simply don’t know how much a farmer struggles to grow a handful of grain. It is a paradox that people worship food but waste it shamelessly.”
The duo feels their job is not done yet. They have been meeting politicians and policymakers in the hope of formulating legislation to curb food wastage at source.
Can food wastage at weddings be curbed?
With studies suggesting that nearly nine tonnes of food is wasted every year in each wedding hall in the city, and with organisers pushing the boundaries of lavishness, can there be regulation to curb extravagant weddings?
The proposal to regulate weddings and other functions in the State has been debated for long, but little action has been taken. In 2015, a private member Bill, Karnataka State Marriages (registration and miscellaneous provisions) Bill 2015, was introduced in the hope of imposing a tax on extravagant weddings.
Recently, Food and Civil Supplies Minister U.T. Khader said the government was considering a policy to curb food wastage and to redistribute it among the poor.
The legislation and policy are yet to fructify.
While laws are scarcely enforced and questions of civil liberties prop up, activists believe there needs to be emphasis on awareness of food wastage in the first place. “There must be awareness among people before making laws on it. Laws will be futile otherwise,” said N.K. Mohan Kumar from Kushalanagar, Kodagu, who was instrumental in the Kodagu Zilla Panchayat passing a resolution in 2012 to curb food wastage.
Having campaigned against food wastage for over 15 years, he believes the habit of not wasting food should be inculcated from childhood itself.
Dwarakanath P.V., cabinet member of Lions Club, wants the campaign against food wastage to be on a par with the initiative to save water.
He wants government aid in the form of cold storage to prevent spoilage of food taken from wedding halls.
It was only in times of dire food shortage that wastage in weddings is kept in check. The 1960s saw the introduction of the Guest Control Act that limits the number of guests at a function.
G.K. Karanth, ICSSR National Fellow at Jain University, wants this Act to be enforced.
“It was introduced because of famine and wars. Whether or not we live in times of food shortage, concerns over waste handling warrant stricter enforcement,” he said.
