I’m writing this early in the week, just back from a grocery trip.
When you see documentaries on Asia, the hosts always tell you what wonderfully fresh produce you can get in Asia. Look at all the wet markets! Aren’t those women sitting in the middle of piles of vegetables straight from the farm? Look, look how shiny the aubergines are, how erect the broccoli, how green the spinach!
After half a decade of living in south-east Asia, the reality does not meet such lofty statements. First of all, you have China. Yeah sure, you want erect broccoli or carrots, you can buy them cheap. Problem is, they come from China, and I don’t trust anything from China. So, if I go to a supermarket, and see “China” on the labels, I don’t buy it. That essentially cuts out Western-style broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, nicer-looking potatoes, apples, pears, oranges, mandarins, peaches, plums and carrots, to name a few.
The alternatives are: Australian carrots? Expensive. US potatoes? Riddled with black holes and scars from the harvesting machines. Also limp. Broccoli? Can’t get it, have to depend on local (or Hong Kong) kai lan instead. Cauliflower? Forget it. Cabbage? Have to wait until a load arrives from the Malaysian highlands. And, as you can guess, all these are more expensive due to their relative scarcity.
I can go to a wet market but if I ask where something is from, they’ll lie to me and tell me everything’s local, which I know they’re not because the damn boxes the vegetables came in are still under the tables, clearly specifying their origins.
So that’s vegetables. Try to stray from a very narrow range that the locals buy, and you’re in trouble.
Let’s go to meat, because I’m a carnivore and so is the rest of the family. Imagine you’re an average Malaysian, earning $3,500/month. That works out to $833/week for a family of four to six (parents + kids +/- grandparent +/- servant). Take away mortgage payments, car payments, utilities, clothes, and so on, and you’re probably left with $250/week for groceries. What can that buy and, more importantly, what is the quality of what it buys?
Chicken is the cheapest at around $6.80/kilogram for a whole bird. Parts are obviously more expensive. At Tesco, you will see shipments of chicken parts. Average price is around $8 to $8.50/kg. Tesco’s wonderful hygiene policies mean that chicken that is a couple of days old (and resting on beds of ice) is mixed with chicken that just came in that morning. What this gives you is a wonderful technicolour display — pink, green, yellow — for you to pick through, together with dead flies and strands of woven nylon packaging. How appetising! Frozen tripe is $13/kilogram, frozen beef lung (don’t ask) is $13/kilogram. Average Australian steak begins at $40/kilogram and is guaranteed not to be tender. Eight slices of Gouda or Edam cheese will set you back $17 and, as a bonus, will be past its expiry date.
At Carrefour, they don’t mix meats like that. Oh no, in Carrefour, they follow the policy of their parsimonious temperate-climate parent company and have no air-conditioning whatsoever in the entire store! This also extends to the meat section. We have been caught out with shrink-wrapped meat that, once unwrapped at home, has proven to be…oh, how shall I put this?…rotten.
Jusco, the Japanese chain, is best for meats, but you’re paying a premium of $2.00/kilogram over market price. I only buy fresh salmon from Jusco (at $50 – $70/kilogram). You think that’s expensive? Cod is $110/kilogram! Lamb is cheaper than Tesco (frozen only) at $50/kilogram. There’s no chance in hell I’m getting any veal because nobody sells any.
Giant is good and cheap for non-perishables but, like Tesco, they try to sell you green vegetables that have disintegrated, rotten onions, and food past their due date. They also sell defrosted meat that they’ve chucked into the freezer section to refreeze.
Mydin is the cheaper, Malay-based supermarket chain. Being Malay-based, don’t expect to find blocks of cheese, cream, alcohol, pork products or, in fact, anything of quality. (The processed cheese slices are a mix of cheese with palm oil, the “ghee” is a mix of butter and palm oil, the chocolates are a mix of chocolate flavouring and palm oil, the butter bricks for baking are a mix of butter and palm oil, the cooking oil is palm oil…you get the drift.) The vegetables are nice and fresh but anything not grown locally is from…you guessed it…China, and the variety available fluctuates alarmingly.
Once chicken on ice starts to go off, it gets shrink-wrapped, put in another section and sold at the original price. Carcasses of local beef are hung up in the meat section and get cut off the bone with a medium-sized general-purpose knife or dagger (I’m not kidding you). There is no concept of “cuts”; you just point to a section that looks kinda meaty and the guy heaves into it with his knife. If you’re lucky, this costs you $24/kilogram. When only the skeleton is left, someone goes through it again in the back room, scraping together the small scraps of meat and fat that are left, shrink wraps it and sells it for $18/kilogram. On the upside, the store is air-conditioned so, at one degree north of the Equator, let’s be thankful for small mercies.
The only other way you can get beef chunks is to buy buffalo meat from India. They are available in most supermarkets, come in 900g (two pound) blocks, cost about $9-10/block, and most of it, defrosted, is nothing more than sinew and ribbons of tough skin. I have also found buffalo hair, human hair and pieces of wood mixed in with the meat. Available mutton is Australian, frozen, cleaner, $25/kilogram, almost 50% fat, and needs to be sliced thinly, then boiled for an hour, before you can start cooking with it.
Let’s go to pork products. The “bacon” you get here (whether in Malaysia or Singapore) is waterlogged. In fact, I warrant that more than half the weight of meat is actually water. It’s also been “fiddled with”. By that, I mean to say that there’s something nasty added to the chemical bath that produces a sharp, over-salty, chemical taste to the meat. I don’t buy it any more because I’m convinced there’s bad stuff in there. If I want imported Western bacon, then I have to pay $30 for 250g of bacon rashers that’s mostly fat. It tastes better, but there’s not much left of it at all once it’s been on the grill and shrinks to less than half its size.
Let’s pause for a wallet check. For a family of four looking forward to a weekend fry-up, expect to pay $60 just for the bacon, $20 for two punnets of mushrooms, $7 for eight nice-looking tomatoes, $5 for one small loaf of non-sweet bread, and $2 for six eggs. So that’s Sunday breakfast for $94 at home, not including beverages (double the prices for Singapore), and just that one meal consumes almost half the weekly grocery budget!
The local pork is tough and mostly sold in strips. Be prepared to pay $30/kilogram at Jusco if you want something that even superficially resembles a chop, but it’ll either be tough or dry.
Quite simply, there is no local butcher shop as I’m used to because there’s no need. There isn’t an understanding of meat that most Westerners take for granted and even the green-hued chicken thighs get bought up (then washed, cooked and served up by unsuspecting grandmothers, is my reckoning). I’m convinced that if more people were educated about food quality, the supermarkets wouldn’t be able to exploit the consumer market like this but, as long as people are willing to cook with sub-standard primary ingredients (and they are, oh gods, they are), such a change will not occur.
So you see, all that crap about fresh quality produce in Asia? It’s a lie. It’s like saying that everyone in Europe eats well because you found one farmer’s market outside Lyons. I’m sure there are some decent (rural) wet markets around but, for the average Asian urbanite, that’s simply not the case. And I’m sitting here writing this because every grocery trip is, ultimately, an episode in depression as I circle the aisles, not buying anything. As the family says on occasion, “Chicken? Again?”
Yep. Sorry.
