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Hugh – an interesting piece there. Your position is a good one.

Viewed from Tokyo there is an interesting contrast. Relatively cheap cooked lunches are common, it is a lot easier to eat well in my opinion as a result. This, together with expectations of high standards and sufficient turnover, means only places selling reasonable food survive.

So here, I don’t think there is a lot of need to cook to enjoy good food. At dinner time, it is more challenging as prices soar.

I am more interested in the Home Cooking Culture of China. Since I don’t think they always eat out. Cheap Food Stalls can’t be everywhere, can they?

Know any good Books on the topic?

Excellent point. I think unfortunately there’s a demand for cheap, crap food (which there probably isn’t in Singapore). A lot of people just don’t care about food.

There could well be an unmet demand for cheap, good food though. In Edinburgh, the mosque kitchen serves fantastic curries and rice really cheaply, and is always packed. Mostly with students.

I guess most people who want good food and can’t afford to go to the “nice” restaurants somehow learn the skills to cook it for themselves. But as you say, that doesn’t mean they really like cooking. Even those of us that do, wouldn’t mind the odd night off.

first its Non Uniform Rational B Spline. NURBS is both singular and plural.

second, its capitalism. MC Donald’s and most national chain restaurants prefer to maintain consistency across the entire country and/ or continent rather than have punctuated quality. if you have a thousand different suppliers across a region you need to maintain the lowest common denominator of quality year after year.

yes they could use locally sourced, top quality, seasonal ingredients, without any added expense to any given franchise. but, this would be a nightmare for management, legal, and quality control departments.

this can be done in the UK or the US or France or Germany but not as easily an in singapore. it is nearly impossible to do it in all.

Very good points. A quick visit to Europe is all that it takes to see that while our restaurants are better for convenience, health doesn’t seem to even come into it over here.

I think there’s a certain fatalism when it comes to eating out over here. We assume that outside food is a priori unhealthy, therefore we don’t seem to even try to choose healthier choices. And because of supply and demand, the food we are presented with gets on average unhealthier.

In my understanding, and in my very arguable opinion, obesity has several factors, and not all of them are directly related to food.

1. Money. When you are constantly exposed to marketing trying to sell you this useless thing (think electronic gadget) and that useless service (think mobile phone), if you give in, you are left with less money at the end of the month. And the food budget is traditionaly the one that is the most compressible, therefore you are going to save on the food. Even if you don’t give in to marketing, you may still be poor, and when your lodging’s rent increases, you are going to compress the food budget. Whichever path you choose, you are therefore forced to buy the cheapest foods, which are made mainly of sugar and hydrogenated fat (with flavourings and artificial colours).

1b. Money. The food industry is an industry, therefore its purpose is to make money, by whatever mean necessary. This means making quick and bland food, and flavouring it as much as necessary to sell it, using mainly sugar (we primates are naturally attracted to sugar), salt (for some reason, anything salty enough seems good) and fat (because flavours dissolve better in fat than in water, and a fatty texture is more pleasant), and overloaded with flavourings (it is fashionable to overload your senses: loud music, loud food, loud colors). Since these kinds of products sell well and make a huge profit, why bother offering the consumers anything else?

2. Time. When you need to spend two hours a day in transportation just to go from home to school/work and back, you don’t necessarily find the time, or even just the energy for cooking at the end of the day, especially if you have kids to take care of. Therefore you go for the pre-made food which, in most cases, is made of cheap products (sugar and hydrogenated fat (with flavourings and artificial colours)), and sold at a premium.

3. Education. Do parents still educate their children in the field of house care, such as cooking, repairing small things, sewing and knitting? The consumer society has led us to believe that you can get any product or service from the industry and that you don’t need to learn the basic skills anymore. So why bother making you own meals, cloths or repair an almost working appliance you can simply throw away and replace with a new one? Why bother cooking when you can buy ready-made food?

4. Individuality. There has been a few years back a surprising study about European’s eating habits. Not about what they ate, but about how they did it. One of the result of the study was that in France, which seems to have the lowest obesity rate in the world after Japan, half of the population is seated at a table for lunch at the same time (around 12.30). In the UK, this peak of “people eating at the same time” happens at 13.20 but concerns only 17% of the population. One of the conclusions of the study was that when people are eating together (like in France), they eat less, not daring to stuff themselves under the scrutiny of their tablemates, leading to less obesity. This conclusion is, I agree, quite arguable, but I remember reading many times that eating at random times and alone is one of the factors of obesity. As a father and a Frenchman, I consider that meals should be taken as often as possible together, around the same table, and without TV (which breaks the "togetherness"). Funily (and vaguely relevant), american kids (a study again) who watch less TV than others are less obsese; not because of getting more exercise, but because they eat less crisps and sodas.

Now, cooking is the opposite of individuality: when you are alone and cook for yourself, you do so probably because you (hope you are going to) enjoy eating what you cook. But when you cook for a group (family, friends, whatever), you do so because you want to give them something that tastes good, something they will enjoy. As Hervé This said hundreds of times, “cooking is love, art and technique”.

Interesting discussion!

Louise – I almost fall into the same camp. I really enjoy eating – but I also really enjoy cooking, to the extent that I’d be quite happy to just cook for other people and not sit down with them to eat, sometimes.

Someone – There are a lot of good introductions to Chinese cooking. Try the Egullet Chinese Cooking forum – http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showforum=71

B.Dewhirst – great idea! I’ve been considering how to get a Stig-type character into the show – might steal that…

Sunny – interesting. That’s really bad – having super-high rents in places that you need to feed your population! It’ll be some kind of complex balance that’s causing that, I guess.

Jeremy – China’s a pretty big country :) So is Japan. And France does have a much better range of eat-out options, as does Spain.

Dougal – No, I’ve got no evidence beyond my own travels and the observations of other people. However, the same is true of most cultural comment. Whilst a massive food hall serving fantastic food and stuffed full, with another one two blocks away, and so on, isn’t a scientific study, it’s sufficient evidence to draw some conclusions from.

“If people don’t care enough to cook their own they certainly don’t care enough to pay for others to cook it.” – Evidence? I don’t care enough about chairs to make my own furniture, but I do care enough to buy good chairs.

“The notion that eating out is the norm … is a seriously screw logic.” – why?

Matthieu – really good comments! Don’t have much to add there, aside from the fact that once again, it all seems to come back to crappy ready food.

Jonas – Surely the “all intervention is Evil” crowd have shut up at least a little recently…

allow me to clarify the point I was making.

the bigger the area and larger the number of people you are trying to serve the more difficult it is to maintain consistency.

Asian food in general tends to lend itself to this.

another point to add to this is that franchises need to suit the tastes of as many customers as possible. with a larger area this becomes exponentially more difficult to do.

I am sorry to say this but the vast majority of UK/US pallets want chicken or beef with salt, grease, and HFCS. in fact if you add too much flavor they simply wont want it.

people like us are a slim minority here.

Dougal -

You’re absolutely right, both of our arguments are currently coming from anecdotal evidence only. Feel free to put up more statistics if you find them, and I’ll do the same if I have time.

"Most people (in my experience) cook their own food, wash their own clothes and drive their own cars. It is possible to get someone to cook for you, but it’s a treat. "

Given the other comments on this thread, that seems like a very UK-centric statement. Most of the world doesn’t even own a car (including me – I get driven around by bus, train and plane drivers). We have people attesting that in Singapore, Japan, India and Europe it’s cheaper to eat out than dine in, which to my mind implies that is isn’t, in fact, a “treat” the world over. And washing clothes isn’t a good comparison – assuming you have a washing machine, it requires zero skill and two minutes’ effort a week, and I’m sure considerably more people would cook for themselves if that was the case for cooking.

(If you don’t have a washing machine it’s a different argument, of course, but I’m assuming most of the posters here do or at least have access to one.)

“There are a wide variety of foods available at equivalent price but the ones with the marketing budget are popular – quality of food has nothing to do with it.”

Speaking as someone who does a lot of marketing, I can tell you that it isn’t nearly as simple as “throw money and people will buy product”. Otherwise the Microsoft Zune would be doing a lot better.

There are are plenty of food shops with a minimal or zero marketing budget – farm shops, small delis, etc – that are doing fine. It’s more complex than “Everyone’s an idiot about food except for us elite few”, and whilst I may be misinterpreting, to me that seems to be what you’re saying.

"I don’t think it’s as simple as “if restaurants were cheaper we’d all eat well”.

That’s definitely true. It’s a continuum.