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The top response at the time I commented implied that the individuals in question were "deliberate food wasters" and "despicable".

If they had permission and were okay with spending all that extra money on leftovers, it's between them and the restaurant. I don't like wasting food on principle, but now we're getting into fuzzy issues around the relationship between supply and demand. At the end of the day, if someone wants to spend their money on food and throw it in the garbage/compost, that's essentially their business.

I'd have more of a problem with it if it were meat, because there's no reasoning around the fact that an animal was killed for it. Rice is in more abundant supply with with less severe negative externalities to its production. We also don't know how much rice it was; "eight pounds" was an eyeball guesstimate that could be completely wrong or exaggerated for narrative effect.

What they shouldn't do is arbitrarily add new terms to the deal after the fact. Customers should be allowed to make an informed decision. If I know that they'll kick me out for eating, I can decide whether to leave or stick around and eat later. If they just kick me out without warning in the middle of my meeting/event/whatever, no one is happy and they look like assholes.

In practice, these are questions I would ask before paying and sitting down, but that shouldn't be expected. The business should either state its terms up front, or provide an early warning when they notice the behavior and offer a full or partial refund. Waiting until someone has eight pounds of rice piled up and then suddenly kicking them out is a ridiculous escalation, and they'd only lose more money when the customer rightfully disputed the charge.

All of this isn't to say that the guys in the story weren't necessarily in the wrong. What I am saying is that we simply don't know. Demanding they be kicked out is making an awful lot of assumptions. We have no idea why they were there or what their interactions with the staff may have been. As other comments have pointed out, there's a good chance that they were in fact charged for the leftovers.

Then you're reading something I didn't say.

If you do that, you should feel guilty.

Guilty of what? It's a business, not a charity. If that's where I happen to be stuck having dinner, and if they're unwilling to accommodate my preferences even at additional cost, I'm not going to go hungry or cheat on my diet purely out of politeness.

They can either solve the problem and increase their revenue, or accept that they've created an edge case situation where some food will be wasted. Punishing their customers would accomplish nothing except loss of business and negative Yelp reviews.

I'd rather see the restaurant try to solve a problem than arbitrarily punish people, especially when "people" might include myself under the wrong circumstances. But I guess no one likes to hear nuance.

If that makes some strangers on the Internet think I'm a "jerk", so be it.

Some people are allergic to rice. Some people are on medically prescribed diets. Maybe there's an obscure religion that forbids eating rice. Some people just don't like rice. Are they all jerks too?

That restaurant wouldn't be my preference, but if I did have to be there for an important reason, I certainly wouldn't be bullied into eating something I didn't want to eat. I'm generally strict about wasting food, but in that situation I wouldn't feel even slightly guilty about it.