Food waste has become a pressing global issue in recent years. In China, the issue of food waste has become increasingly severe. As a provincial capital city, Harbin is also a major agricultural city in China with distinct urban and rural features. This paper uses Harbin as a case study to evaluate different strategies for preventing and reducing food waste based on these urban–rural differences. This research is based on official data on household food waste in urban and rural areas of Harbin, as well as data collected from 333 telephone surveys through stratified random sampling. Independent t-tests, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and logistic regression analysis were used to analyze the survey data, followed by a review of existing food waste policies and strategies. Our findings show that Harbin has had a positive response in adhering to national anti-food waste policies. However, its implementation has not been effective. There is a continuous increase in food waste generation. Moreover, gender, level of education, and household annual income have a significant impact on residents’ food waste habits and there are significant differences between urban and rural areas in terms of “eating out” and “ordering food ingredients”. The average daily amount of food waste generated by urban households is 3216.31 g, which is 2.4 times that of rural households. There are also differences in the causes of food waste between urban and rural residents due to different diets and eating habits. As a result, feasible and effective policy recommendations have been proposed to reduce food waste in response to these urban–rural differences.

In recent years, China has achieved notable results with its poverty alleviation program, the focus of which is shifting toward the comprehensive promotion of rural revitalization. The role played by sustainable human resources in agriculture is becoming increasingly prominent. In this context, China’s sustainable talent in agriculture is used as the research object, and a neural network analysis method is applied to construct a prediction model of sustainable agricultural talent to forecast its supply and demand. The prediction aims to provide a scientific basis for the strategic planning of talent development for rural revitalization. Based on the forecast results by region and province, we analyzed the level of coordinated development of talent supply and demand to provide a reference for the coordinated development of supply and demand of sustainable talent in agriculture in China. The results showed that a large sustainable agricultural talent demand gap exists in China. The overall talent supply and demand coupling coordination level is low; we found significant differences among different regions and provinces, characterized by decreasing order of the northeast, central, west, and east. According to the socio-economic development level, agricultural economic foundation, and other factors, we divided the provinces into six types for analysis. To promote the coordinated development of sustainable human agricultural resources, talent policy support at the national level is required to reduce the loss of human resources to other countries; at the regional level, the talent environment for rural revitalization should be optimized to increase the attraction of talent. At the provincial level, agricultural and forestry education resources should be created to increase the supply of sustainable agricultural talent.