I often come home from banquets with bags of leftovers, not because I especially want them, but because someone at the table always insists on packing food up. In reality, very few people are eager to take those dishes home, especially if they have a family of their own and regular meals waiting. I’m not particularly comfortable bringing banquet leftovers back, even when hardly anyone touched them. Once a dish has sat in the middle of a shared table, I can’t help feeling that it already carries traces of everyone else.

My parents see it differently. To them, leaving behind dishes that were barely eaten is a real moral failure. Throwing away edible food feels sinful. That attitude may come from a generation marked by hardship and scarcity, a generation whose memory of hunger still overrides both today’s material abundance and modern concerns about hygiene.

After another meal that ended with too much food packed up, my son asked why we had brought back so many dishes. I told him it was because the people at the meal were not very familiar with one another, and meals like that tend to involve ordering more than necessary.

He immediately asked the obvious question: why does eating with less familiar people lead to more food being ordered?

Because the host is afraid guests might not get enough to eat. In Chinese banquet culture, abundance itself is part of hospitality. If too little is ordered, the host risks being seen as stingy.

My son kept going: why does leaving a lot of food over count as proof of generosity?

The answer is awkward but simple. The host decides what to order, but the guests decide how much to eat. Only the guests know whether they are full or whether they enjoyed the meal. Yet in a culture that prizes restraint and indirectness, guests often won’t speak plainly. Someone who is still hungry may say they are full. Someone who didn’t enjoy the dishes may still praise them. So the host has to guess. And the easiest way to avoid the embarrassment of seeming ungenerous is to order a lot, especially dishes that look impressive, and let visible leftovers serve as evidence that no one could possibly have gone hungry.

That, of course, creates another contradiction. If this wastes so much food, why can’t guests simply say what they really think?

Because directness itself can be treated as bad manners. At someone else’s table, especially in a formal setting, saying that the food was not enough or not to your taste can be taken as uncultured or rude. Even when the table is full, formal meals are often more about socializing than about eating. People are expected to talk, not just focus on food. So it is entirely possible for guests to leave not quite full while the table is still crowded with leftovers.

My son found that contradiction hard to accept. If the system is so wasteful, why not change it?

I told him that much of this waste grows out of the habit of shared dishes. In a shared-meal system, everyone sits around one table and eats from the same plates. The food belongs to everyone, not to any clearly defined individual. That is very different from an individually portioned meal, where each person’s food is placed on their own plate.

That difference matters not only for ownership of the food itself, but also for ownership of the moral responsibility attached to waste. If each person has a clearly assigned portion, then each person is also clearly responsible for finishing it. Most people will do so. But if the dishes belong to the whole table, each diner hesitates to take too much of what they like, because doing so might reduce what others can eat. At the same time, no single person feels fully responsible for what remains at the end. The waste was created collectively, so the blame is diffused collectively as well.

In economic terms, it is a question of property rights: when ownership is clear, responsibility is clear. When ownership is shared, responsibility becomes blurred. At a banquet, what is shared is not just the food. Even the moral burden of wasting it is shared so widely that it barely lands on anyone in particular.

My son then asked why we do not simply adopt the Western model of individual portions.

I told him that China did not always eat communally. For a long stretch of ancient history, meals were in fact individually portioned. The shift toward shared dining came later, around the Tang and Song periods.

He wanted to know why a system that seems so practical was replaced.

There are many explanations. One common claim is that in earlier times material life was poorer, dishes were fewer, and everyone ate more or less the same thing, so individual portions made sense; later, as food became more varied and abundant, communal dining became more suitable.

I don’t find that explanation convincing. During the Zhou period, when individual portions were already established, aristocrats and nobles also ate that way. For them, scarcity was not the issue. That suggests that individual portioning was fundamentally cultural rather than simply determined by available resources.

Another explanation points to furniture and posture. Before the Tang, people commonly sat on the floor and used low tables, which supposedly made communal dining less practical. Later, higher tables and chairs associated with non-Han groups spread more widely, making shared dining easier.

That argument also seems weak to me. Furniture is usually created to meet social needs, not the other way around. If there had been a strong desire for communal dining, larger and higher tables could have been made to accommodate it. Even a raised platform would have solved the problem. It is hard to believe that people only began eating together because the right wooden furniture happened to appear.

So what caused the shift? I cannot claim certainty here. At most, I have a guess: the rise of centralized political culture after earlier periods may have mattered.

Before the Tang, China was not always a fully centralized state in the later sense. Even when central power was strengthened, the scholar-official class and long-established elite families still retained significant influence. Their relationship with the throne was closer to negotiation and cooperation than pure personal dependence. In that kind of environment, a stronger sense of status among peers and a greater acknowledgment of the individual could survive, and individually portioned dining may have reflected that spirit.

After the Tang, however, older aristocratic lineages were broken, and the political elite became more dependent on imperial power. As that happened, broader ideas of equality and individual standing weakened, while collective norms gained more weight beneath the singular authority of the throne. In such a cultural climate, eating from one large shared table could more easily become the dominant form.

My son then asked whether the West had always used individual portions.

Not at all. As I explained to him, individually portioned dining in the West became established after the Renaissance. The Renaissance involved a renewed emphasis on human dignity and the individual. Before that, shared dining was also common in the West.

Why would that have been the case?

Again, I linked it to the dominant intellectual climate. For more than a thousand years before the Renaissance, much of Western Europe lived under a Christian order centered on divine authority. People were understood primarily as subjects of God. Human conduct was expected to orient itself around the divine rather than around personal preference. Under such a framework, thought and behavior tended toward uniformity, and shared dining could naturally become the mainstream practice. As for ancient Greece and Rome, I do not know for certain whether their dominant pattern was individual or communal dining, though I suspect individual portions may have been more likely.

At that point my son asked the most practical question of all: which system is actually better?

My answer was that both have advantages. If what you value most is a lively atmosphere, a sense of warmth, and the pleasure of everyone sharing dishes together, then communal dining has obvious appeal. If you care more about the individual, personal preference, hygiene, or dislike the idea of other people’s saliva mixing into the meal, then individual portions are clearly preferable.

He followed with another question: does individual portioning do a better job of preventing waste?

Yes, I told him, it does.

Then why, he asked, do we keep promoting empty-plate campaigns instead of promoting individual portions more directly?

Because the two things are not the same. Individual portioning is a cultural form. An empty-plate campaign is a slogan. What many people want is to preserve the culture of shared dining while also eliminating waste. They want both at once.

And yet the anti-waste message has been repeated for years, while waste continues.

To explain why, I asked him to think about hotel breakfast buffets. Buffets look like individual portioning: everyone takes food onto their own plate. But why do so many people still leave uneaten food behind?

He did not know.

I told him that a buffet may appear to be individually portioned, but many people still experience it mentally as a kind of communal meal. The food is merely transferred from a common supply onto a personal plate, much like taking food from shared dishes with a small side plate at a round table. On the surface, the food has been separated. In the mind, however, it still feels collective rather than personal.

That is the key difference between buffet-style self-service and a true culture of individual portions. The buffet separates the food, but it does not clearly assign the moral responsibility for wasting it. Many people still feel that only what they paid for specifically, item by item, is truly theirs. A buffet paid at a flat rate does not create the same sense of ownership. Since the food still feels like part of a communal pool, the logic becomes: if it gets wasted, it gets wasted.

My son grew discouraged and asked whether food waste can ever really be eliminated.

I told him it can. After all, our family usually eats from shared dishes at home, yet we almost never waste food. Why?

Because my mother cooks according to how much each person usually eats. If there is a little too little, my father and I will eat a bit less so everyone is satisfied. If there is a little too much, everyone takes a bit more and we finish it. We use a shared-meal system at home, but we still avoid waste.

My son thought about it and said that at home the food belongs to us because we paid for it, so naturally we do not want to waste it.

That is part of it, I said, but not all of it. What really makes the difference is a whole set of conditions working together: everyone respects ownership, everyone has a moral instinct against waste, everyone cares about the other people at the table, everyone tells the truth about whether the food tastes good and whether they are full, and the person cooking prepares food according to actual need. When those things are present, communal dining does not have to produce waste.

My son thought that sounded simple and wondered why, if it is so simple, waste has not disappeared after years of public advocacy.

Because it only looks simple. In a large shared-table meal, you cannot clearly define what belongs to whom. Without clear responsibility, thrift remains abstract. When the diners are not close, they are unlikely to care more about others than about themselves. People often do not speak honestly about appetite or preference. The person ordering worries about ordering too little, not too much. Nearly every condition that helps our family avoid waste breaks down in a formal group meal. Under those circumstances, finishing everything is very difficult.

My son sighed and asked again whether waste is really unavoidable.

I told him there are still at least two ways to reduce it significantly.

One is for each person to order the dishes they themselves want and make sure they finish them; if they cannot, they should personally take responsibility for finding someone to share the rest with.

The other is to let one person order for the table, but only if that person has a fairly good sense of everyone’s appetite and tastes, orders according to actual need, and the whole group is willing to respect one another and help finish whatever remains.

My son said that the second method sounded a lot like what people already claim to be doing now.

I did not really know how to answer that cleanly. My own feeling is that when a meal begins with formal seating arrangements, rank, sequence, and etiquette, leftovers are almost built into the event. So I simply told him that when people at the table become genuinely familiar with one another, waste is less likely. Friends are more willing to help each other economize, and fewer people want to look careless or morally indifferent in front of people who really know them.

So when it comes to shared dining and individual portions, my own preference is fairly clear: in public settings, I lean toward individual portions; at home, I still prefer shared dishes.