Going from Bali to Malaysia to Singapore has been walking up the development staircase and falling off the edge of healthy eating. Bali easily had the healthiest, freshest food of our trip while Singapore and Malaysia compete with India and Greece for the worst for us.
It’s not that we don’t enjoy it. Healthy and tasty often have an inverse relationship. But Singapore and Malaysia really rate poorly when it comes to freshness and health – especially within their ethnic cuisines.
Noodles, rice – steamed and fried. In spicy sauce, fish sauce, thick sauce, soy sauce, chili oil and just oil. With tofu, chicken, beef, pork, mutton, lamb, goat, crab, lobster, fish, processed fish cakes, mussels – innards… Deep fried, fried, roasted (in skin or fat), steamed, boiled, stewed, sauteed – and did I mention fried?
Vegetables? Some. Sauteed and fried. Deep fried too. There always has to be a deep fried option. Oh, and covered in Malay or Indian curries too.
Why taste the veggies themselves when you could be tasting curry, sesame oil – or really any oil for that matter? Singaporeans don’t settle for plain, boring veggies….
If you’re someone who looks at the local cuisine and becomes aghast, it helps to know there are a couple of things at work.
First, there’s my theory about financial status and food. Cultures that have traditionally known poverty tend to have a lot of traditional foods that helped them stretch their dollars.
Soups, for example, can take a few veggies or a little bit of meat and make a lot of food of it. Dumplings take a little bit of expensive meat and surround it with cheap flour and fat to give it substance.
Within my own cultural context – Eastern European Jewish foods – chopped liver uses a relatively cheap cut of meat and flavors it up with fat and onions. Blintzes surround some cheese mixed with sour cream and butter with a flour-based crepe that gets fried in chicken fat or butter.
Tasty? Yep. Horrible for you? Definitely if you’re sedentary. However, if you don’t have a lot of food, want to feel full, and need enough energy to get through a hard day – particularly if it involves physical labor – these foods will do you.
Contrast this with French cuisine. France has been relatively wealthy since the Renaissance. It has fantastic growing lands, slow flowing rivers and always a substantial, but never overblown population.
Its cuisine centers around fruit, fresh vegetables, salads and delicately prepared meats. And bread and cheese. Lots of cheese. While the French of course have some things that are on the “bad for you” side – their food is largely lighter, healthier and more varied than much of the world.
Bali too – while never rich – has an island highly capable of food production, incredible home and property ownership and a moderate population. They eat tons of fresh fruits and veggies and not nearly so much meat.
Turn back to the cultures of Singapore – Indian, Chinese, and Malay. All traditionally poor. Two have always had huge populations competing for resources. And the Malays who have had great land and plenty of space just so happen to use the most fruit and veggies in their diet.
Cultures build cuisine around their socioeconomic histories.
The cultures of Singapore mastered using cheap ingredients into a lot of tasty food. Fat gives things weight – fills you up. Starches are good for energy – they get you through the day. When you’re working fields, carrying cargo, constructing buildings, fishing, and ditch digging, fried foods, starches and heavy, fatty sauces are your friends.
Only today they’re sort of a death sentence.
As many of us know, tastes don’t change in a generation or even two despite upward mobility. Food is part of our cultures. Everyone has their foods special to different occasions and times in life. We pass recipes down like family heirlooms. For many of us, they are our inheritance and part of the way we link generations and people.
Even though they can afford “better,” most Singaporeans still love their bee hoon noodles, spicy seafood laksa soup, chicken biriyani, murtabak, popiah spring rolls, mee rebus noodles crowned in curry and topped with a hardboiled egg, steamed buns filled with plum sauce-laden pork, fried dumplings and fried oyster omelets.
Guess what? Success means they can now afford to have all they want of their flavorful foods.
A nurse I once recruited explained to me how Singapore’s incredible rise in income has led it to having one of the world’s highest rates of kidney dialysis. She knows – she was a manager at one the National Kidney Foundation dialysis centers. They are so well designed and advanced that medical leaders from around the world – including the United States – come to see them.
A great accomplishment….sort of.
Diabetes and obesity spiked in Singapore as Chinese fatty pork went from being a once-a-year treat special to Chinese New Year to being a weekly meal or even a daily lunch. Instead of having a lotus moon cake only on Chinese Moon Festival in fall, people can enjoy them any day of the week in any quantity they want.
Oh, and Singaporeans LOVE sugar. It’s not coffee and tea that keep them going all day, it’s all their very sweet drinks along with their standard morning kaya (coconut custard jam) toast with heaps of butter and a soft-boiled egg.
Combine that with moving from shipyards and pulling rickshaws to driving air conditioned taxis and working in 90-story office towers and you have everything it takes to need a fantastic system of kidney dialysis clinics.
Not that Singapore is in any way alone in its problems.
Of course, Singapore has one other food-related issue that sort of makes the food an extra bit unhealthier – everything’s imported. Singapore doesn’t grow or raise a morsel of food.
The government decided that since the country could never be anywhere close to self-sufficient, that farming was simply a poor use of the little land the country has. Farmers were forced from their farms and transplanted into condos in tall buildings. It took the government years to catch and confiscate all the pigs and chickens people hid in their bedrooms and balconies.
One unfortunate result is that produce gets sprayed to enhance its shelf-life. Food comes from as near as Malaysia and as far as the United States and Brazil. Go to a supermarket and choose whether your prefer American, Japanese, Australian or Argentinian beef. You can select among cucumbers from Britain, Thailand and Mexico. Don’t worry – none of them are fresh, they just look that way.
But what else are they going to do? That’s just the way it works for an island-nation like this.
For people like us who are just passing through, it doesn’t matter anyway. We’ve thrown caution to the wind and decided to just enjoy some of the local specialties we’ll never see in other places. I do love a good steamed bun filled with lotus seed paste while walking down the street – one of my favorite breakfasts.
At the same time, I give younger Singaporeans credit. Singaporeans love cuisine from all over the world and they truly have everything – from Italian to Spanish tapas to sushi. They are some of the most international eaters ever. Younger Singaporeans seem to particularly gravitate toward world cuisines – and also to things much healthier than fried breads with fried meat inside.
Salads, sandwiches, grilled chicken – they have all that too. And there’s more and more of it all the time. They manage to support a lot of Subways and Kenny Rogers Roasters too. Go Kenny.
Emily and I have very much enjoyed our stay, our snacks and our meals. However, my body doesn’t like me as much as it did in Bali. We’ll be looking to Vietnam for some freshness, veggies and maybe some cut-up fruit vendors on the streets. Please!
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