If there is one thing I’m so blessed with, it’s to be born in Singapore which really is a land of the most amazing tasting morsels on earth ever at wallet friendly prices. Nothing bonds people in Singapore more than a good boisterous debate on where the best Chicken Rice is, or who makes the best Meepok.
But the food landscape in Singapore is changing and the effects of its changes are starting to scare me. In order to meet rental rates and the ‘sky-high cost’ of living in Singapore, F&B outlets are churning out portions that are way too large and way too unhealthy. In order to entice people to eat their food, they have bastardized their recipes by adding 3 of the most addictive substances (unknown/quietly ignored?) by man ever– Salt, Sugar and Unhealthy Fat. Other sellers have to jump on the bandwagon as well because which person in their right mind would pay the same amount for a meal that is less flavourful and smaller in portion?
Aside from freshly prepared food that have turn into monster creations saddled with MSG, salt, fat and sugar, there are all the “food” that comes in boxes these days and labels longer than Finnegan’s Wake. Okay, so maybe not as long but certainly as hard to read! I once came across a pack of “frozen meat pies” with stuff on the label sounding like some sort of Sci- Fi movie. Aspartame, Sodium Benzoate, Butylated Hydroxyanisole, Sodium Nitrates. WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? In Secondary One I was told by my secondary school teacher NEVER to ever eat any of the chemicals in the science lab. Now why are we putting so many in boxes and selling them as food? And worse, giving them to our CHILDREN!!
Add the fact that all these “food” are nutritionally empty, making us hungry ALL THE TIME and the easy availability of food that is high in salt, fat and sugar and I present to you…
a nation that is eating more than ever but growing sicker and sicker by the minute.
As a person, as a nation, as a WORLD, we are spending billions of dollars churning out processed junk then spending billions of dollars to heal ourselves from the processed junk. We aren’t even talking about money to heal ourselves from cholesterol, heart diseases, diabetes etc. On weight management alone, these statistics show that by 2015, we are looking at sales of up to $650b billion for the global weight management industry.
$650. Billion.
Literally, billions of dollars, spent putting a band aid on a symptom rather than solving the core problem. We are talking about taxpayers money moving away from education, housing,
welfare etc to solve preventable obesity and diabetes and whatnot.
All these money. When people are starving, homeless and desperate for education.
My heart is doing a headless chicken run around my ribcage screaming noooooooo!
I really really don’t want that.
I want money that is unnecessarily spent on the diet industry an preventable diseases to move back to where it’s really needed. I want my fellow citizens (and the world!) to be filled with health and happiness.
I want a country where adults have time to sit in the sun and picnic and young children grow up on a diet of proper nutrition. I want young girls to never have to pinch their tummy rolls in the mirror then inhale a bucket of fried chicken and ice cream in order to soothe their pain and hatred of themselves. I want little girls to grow up spreading the message of health and beauty to their daughters, not the warped subliminal messages that so many generations of women before them grew up
with.
I want to stop body bashing and unhealthy obsessions with body sizes. If anything, I would like us to be obsessed with health and loving those around us.
I want to preserve the culture and heritage of the food we have in this country. I love this country and the people in it. And I want to meet everyone, hear their stories, learn from them, watch what they cook and share a meal together.
I want life to be filled with food that is REAL, that has the power to inspire, to bond and to heal. Food that is nourishing– not just nutritional. That is as good for your well-being, as it is for your body
(say NO! to bland boiled chicken breast all day, everyday :X). The tastes, the flavour, the texture, MHMM! Food that makes you feel good like nothing else can. And when we feel good inside, it just all comes gushing forth and soon everyone in Singapore will be so happy and full of good stuff and not feeling crabby and bloated and irritable (yes, food can do that to you) that all the MRT trains would be filled with happy smiley people and sprightly senior citizens who can do cartwheels!
ONE CAN DREAM, EH?
At the end of the day, this blog is really for information sharing. I am just a girl who woke up one day and decided that I needed to treat my body better but couldn’t find a single resource on the net to
healthier eating in Singapore. All the recipes I looked up online had strange ingredients I’d never seen in my whole life on this sunny island. I tried googling ‘healthy restaurants in Singapore’ once and got
sent to McD’s nutritional information page. Now I’m on a mission to hunt them all down and share whatever I learn along the way as well with my fellow Singaporeans.
Maybe, just maybe then, one day… we’ll be the senior citizens doing cartwheels in the MRT. 🙂
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