Marmite Prawns

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Amongst the challenges of wandering in exotic places has been the constant need to balance one’s calorie intake with decisions as to what is actually food and what is not. When it comes to consumption, I subscribe to the theory that people are fat because they over eat, not because of any disorder, such as the McDonald’s Syndrome. It is not surprising that some well-paid medical experts (American most likely) have published learned papers which argue against that proposition, but as someone who has fought obesity all his life, I know that if I exercise and eat well I look reasonable. If I do not exercise and I eat more than I need, particularly food that is not ‘good for you’, I put on weight.

I remember on a Merpati flight in Indonesia being suffocated by a mobile whale (again, as It happens, American) who demanded that I lift the arm rests between us so that he could get more of the right side of his body into his seat. He forgot to mention that the right hand side of his body flopped over my left thigh and almost reached my own right armrest. I do not exaggerate.

As I did not fancy a flight under conditions akin to suffocation and strangulation by blubber, I called the hostess. The charming Indonesian lass smiled at me when I asked if Whale Man could be moved into cargo or somewhere more appropriate than a human seat.

I must be fair here, of course. Merpati seats were designed for Indonesians of average 55 kg weight and a height about 160cms. Anyone, including me, over those specifications suffered severe constrictions.

Unable to find alternative accommodation for the whale, she smiled helplessly. I refused to sit down. Whale Man spluttered about human rights and ‘fat-cism’. I stood my ground. The door of the plane closed.

‘Please sit down,’ urged the hostess. I refused. The engines whirred to life.

I had some support from an Indonesian army officer (he was wearing a uniform) in the row in front who suggested that the hostess ask the captain to remove the whale. This was all in Indonesian, which the America blimp did not understand.

The hostess ran to the flight deck. The engines died down and to his eternal credit, the captain came back and asked the American to get off the plane, buy two tickets and take a later flight.

‘This is an insult!’ shouted the large lump (amidst other less savory comments and threats) as he lumbered down the hastily reconnected stairs. ‘This would never happen in a civilized country like America!’

My army mate winked at me.

‘People have funny ideas of what being civilized means,’ he said.

I make no apology for objecting. I had a friend in Papua New Guinea who was as broad as he was high and—acknowledging that he could not fit into seats narrower than the Phoenix capsule of Chilean mine rescue fame—insisted on buying two seats for himself whenever he had to fly.

(Actually, he didn’t pay: the law department did. He was a magistrate.) When the US courts overturned the practice of insisting on obese people buying two tickets because it was discriminatory, I sighed. There is no justice in this world, really.

 Mind you, I had my own comeuppance in Samarinda in Kalimantan. I checked in on a regional airline for a short flight to Balikpapan. The plane was an eight-seat Baron.

‘There is an excess baggage charge for 12 kilos,’ said the clerk.

‘But I only have hand luggage’. I said.

‘You weigh 92 kilograms, sir’, said the clerk. ‘The limit is 80kgs per passenger. You are twelve kilos overweight!’

I remonstrated. I demanded  to speak to the manager. He came. We talked. I paid. When the flight was called, two passengers boarded: myself and an Indonesian who would have had trouble topping 50 kgs! I went on a diet after that.

I am encouraged by a move by Samoan Airlines to charge people by the kilo. If that approach were to spread, you can be sure there would be a massive outcry; from the massive. Even I might whimper. After all, I am no sylph.

 Ah food! It has always been something close to my large stomach and living in Asia has seen me embroiled in some tremendous tussles with taste, temptation and tonnage. Many (including me) would argue that Asia leads the world in culinary skill. Malaysia, along with Japan and Vietnam, has (arguably) the best food in Asia. In Malaysia‘s case, so many cultures have settled there that Indian, Chinese and Malay traditions have ‘fusioned’ into a vast array of the tastiest cooking in the continent: in my humble opinion, bar none: Peranakan.

Of course, some people only look on the down side. I have friends in Australia who are horrified at what Asians eat. Having never left Australia, they are, of course, authorities and regale those who are not watching the football with tales of brains being scooped out of live monkeys in China, horrific slaughtering techniques of dolphins in Japan and snake stripping in Hong Kong—and it happens.

Of course, most of those who, in 2010, took up the cause célèbre of the award-winning documentary, The Cove, on the dolphin cull in Japan would have gone home to a dinner of roast chicken or grilled steak.

 Have they ever visited a slaughterhouse?  One way or another, humanely or not, animals are killed so that humans can eat them. I won’t argue with levels of barbarity, but at the end of the day, the animal is killed and if we are to be consistent, that is the issue we should address, not just the way in which it is killed. Whether we are killed gently or barbarically, we still die.

We elect to eat meat. Whether it is a duck or a dolphin, a fish or a pheasant, the animal dies. Do people get upset at the death throes of a fish caught on a hook or suffocated in a net? Do people get upset when chickens are strung onto a conveyor by a hook and have their throats slit? What about a stun gun to the head of a cow? They are all dispatched unceremoniously? Do these practices upset people? No! Should they? Only if it is personal.

In East Timor my cook prepared for a Portuguese Chicken dinner for guests. He bought the chicken and tied it by the leg under a tree at the front door. My guests arrived for a pre dinner meeting and one of them made a fuss over the beautiful chook.

We were enjoying drinks when the sound of a squawking chook disturbed our discussion. We let it pass. Our meeting finished, we went outside to the veranda for drinks.

‘Where is the rooster?’ asked one of the guests.

‘In the pot!’ I explained. ‘Manario slit its throat’.

Horrified, he looked at me and gasped: ‘You mean he killed it?’

I nodded.

‘I refuse to eat it then!’ he said.  

‘More for the rest of us, then,’ I replied and shook my head in disbelief. While I had a fifteen-year stint as a vegetarian, I now eat meat. I accept that the animal has been killed. I prefer not to dwell on the details. If cruelty is to be the arbiter of our acceptance of food, then, if I am not mistaken, there is generally less cruelty in Malaysia than in other countries but that is written with a grain of MSG. It has some wonderful dishes, along with some which are not so wonderful.

I recall a particularly harrowing experience in Johor Baru with some Indian acquaintances who took me to what they enthusiastically and euphemistically described as an exceptional restaurant.

The only thing exceptional about it was that it was a beer drinking barn and not a restaurant. It was filled with more large Indians than I ever thought existed. And I mean large.

The Greatest Loser’s talent scouts would do well to hang round there. The place served beer, beer and more beer and played Indian karaoke. The beer helped the karaoke sound less abrasive than it was.

The food? The first dish to appear (after three bottles of beer each, large bottles) was wild boar. Tough. Greasy. Ghastly. If you had less than a full set of your own teeth, you could not have chewed it.

The second dish? Iguana. After all, we were in the Iguana Restaurant.

‘It is not actually iguana’, my friends explained as I tried to remove five tiny slithers of bone from between my teeth and three embedded in my gum.

‘Eating iguana is no longer allowed because of the cruelty to iguanas in the preparation,’ he said, ‘and also they are disappearing’.

I looked at him and sucked on a micro morsel of iguana flesh attached to fourteen and a half bone fragments.

‘Take a peek through the window into the pen behind the kitchen,’ encouraged my friend. ‘You might see what I mean’.

I declined.

‘So if this is not iguana, what is it?’ I asked.

‘Monitor lizard,’ came the reply.

‘And what happens when the monitor lizards disappear?’ I asked.

‘The iguanas will have multiplied by then, so we can start eating them once more,’ he smiled triumphantly. ‘Then that will give the monitor lizards time re-establish themselves!’

Silly me! Of course. As for the moni-guana, it was awful with a capital AW. The gluggy lumps on my plate were little more than bones with a suggestion of flesh hidden between the tiny joints of its extremely bony body. As a dish, it was dreadful.

At least the pheasant that came after the fifth bottle of beer was fine, as were the chunky potato wedges in chili and paprika.

It was Indian food the like of which I never saw in India itself. In fact I never want to see it again. But who am I to complain? Cruelty to monitor lizards?

Watch them bleeding snakes for the blood tonic so highly regarded by impotent Chinese men in  Hong Kong and by Malays in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur? Horrifying.

Or what about stabbing live lobsters in Vietnam and mixing the white goo of their blood with rice wine into a lethal cocktail that is supposed to ease joint pains?

Or what about skewering a live dog and roasting it on a spit to provide a natural alternative to Viagra in Medan and Timor? Even better, go to Roti or Flores and gouge out some fish eyes to be squashed between your teeth before they lose their freshness. It does wonders for your vitality.

Mind you, the manner of preparation need not necessarily be the only thing to put you off your food. Some cuisines leave much to be desired.

As much as I loved living in Bhutan, one big negative was hygiene and its associated deficiency: local food. On the hygiene front I could never really deal with the sight of restaurant (I use the term loosely) owners spraying water over the floors of their eating establishments and then standing by with fly swats in case more than thirteen flies settled on to your bread as you lifted it to your mouth. Wham!

‘See, sir, they have flown away’.

‘But three fell into my soup!’

‘Let me get them out for you’.

I was (mostly) vegetarian in those days and that—in those days—was advisable.

‘Whatever you do,’ I was advised, ‘stay away from fish and meat’.

It is not a hard ask. The vegetables and fruit are almost all locally grown and delightfully fresh. It is what they did with them that left something to be desired. The national dish was a concoction called emadatse, made from chilis (ema) and cheese (datse). Variations involved using potatoes and mushrooms. As food, it missed the point of being food almost entirely. During both sojourns there, I subsisted on Indian food. Mind you, I tried most of everything (which was hardly a wide range) and suffered as a result.

I have never been in any country where I had so many stomach problems, though Kiribati came close. Maybe it was the odd dishes. Try sautéed crow’s beak for starters. No! It was not the pointy bit of the bird, but a pod-like vegetable cooked with yak cheese.

The red rice surprised me. I know rice. Forty years in Asia, you see a bit of it, particularly when you spend a good deal of that time working in rural areas teaching Asian farmers how to grow it.

But red rice? I had never heard of it till I got to Bhutan. It is slightly nuttier than brown rice, which is perhaps an apt description for... but I digress.

When I decided (not out of choice but out of hunger) to forget my strict vegetarian scruples, I discovered the salty tea and tiny dumplings called momo, filled with pork or cheese.

‘Is there any pork in these?” I asked.

‘Not much’.

But there was. I think that these were tasty mainly because pigs in Bhutan ate lots of marijuana which grew in profusion in the central valleys. The office I worked in had an all-marijuana garden! Fat cows blissfully staggered around the place. Mind you, I was assigned to the Ministry of Agriculture.

How now brown zow? Made of dried, flattened grains, zow was served in a steaming cup of overly sweet tea flavored with salt and yak milk. Invariably, whenever I arrived at a monastery they offered me some. One cup would keep a sumo wrestler going for three weeks! It was possibly the most tasteless goo (after slowly boiled taro or American hamburgers) that ever resulted from man’s lack of culinary imagination.

Despite the abundance of chilies, Bhutanese cuisine is not spicy. Capsicums are used more than chilies, though sometimes I could not tell the difference. Whatever, capsi-cum-chili was used in great quantity in all cooking. In autumn, the roof of every house is bright red with capsi-cum-chillies, drying in the sun.

Asian food on the whole—zow, iguana, dog and snake tonic aside for a moment—is marvelous. The best?

Let’s look at Japan. Most Japanese are lithe and healthy. They have to be. I have never understood why a country that can produce the most exquisite art that evokes peace and calmness can have a population that lives (especially in Tokyo) at such a frenetic pace.

Mind you, Kyoto and Nara, perhaps because they are closer to more beauty and peace than in Tokyo, are less frenetic but generally, there are few fat Japanese.

Maybe it also has something to do with the strange Japanese idea of convenience. Their idea of a connecting station could involve a one-kilometer scurry. You see signs everywhere: Shinjuku Station, 850 meters, Heian Shrine, 1.2 kilometers, platform 21 in Shinagawa Station, ten minutes from platform 1, at a trot, of course!

I suspect it is a sly plot by the government to fit more people into trains by keeping them thinner! If they were all sumo wrestlers, as they are in America, the trains would carry fewer people. Don’t get me wrong. There are fat Japanese, but they are either Sumo wrestlers or aged and usually overweight men who frequent gay saunas.

Mind you, I do have a major quibble with Japanese food. Breakfast! Japanese breakfasts are so bad that they make McDonalds Egg McMuffins seem like haute cuisine. An anemic sandwich accompanied by a miniature salad (three under-nourished lettuce leaves and half a cherry tomato with mayonnaise) and (if you are especially lucky) a thimble of yoghurt is the norm. Maybe the idea is that you starve early so that you can enjoy dinner more later.

So forget breakfast. Let’s talk about food. Regardless of your choice—from sashimi to sushi, teppanyaki to tempura, or ramen to rice cakes—Japanese cuisine is exquisite in both taste and appearance. The prices tend to be exquisite as well. In fact, the cost is appalling, but, hey, that is the case with everything in Japan! If they could only sort out their breakfasts, they would nip the title of best Asian food in the bud! After all, they have considerable yen for food.

Vietnamese cuisine is a close contender for Asia’s best. The French influence aside with their wonderful baguettes with the crispest vegetables imaginable and fillings of all sorts, Vietnamese food strikes a happy balance between being both healthy and delicious and that is not an easy achievement. Wonderful soups, lashings of fresh vegetables, delightful meals that inevitably evoke freshness, taste and, surprisingly, health!

More so than in Japan, you see very few fat Vietnamese. Unless they are in Government limousines, of course!

Chinese food? When it comes to food: I am not a foreign devil. Calling me a gweilo goes way below the belt! I like most Chinese food, though I have difficulty remembering the names of dishes. I do have some guidelines for how to find good food in China?

Rule 1: Only go into restaurants that are already full. If they are not full, they are no good.

Rule 2: How to choose your dish?  As you walk in look closely at what is on other’s tables and point to a dish and say ‘that one’.

That is all you need to know. I learned these two rules very early in the piece. I studied Mandarin (unsuccessfully) in 2006 and tried saying things like ‘Wo Ai Fan’ and smiling widely. It got me nothing to eat but I did get a few invitations to private repasts that focused on pleasures other than food...

I tried to learn the word for please (so that I could pretend to be polite when I ordered food), but when I googled it, the message came up: ‘Sorry, no matching entries were found in the dictionary’.

Then I discovered qîng. I decided to qîng for my supper but most waiters didn’t like my qînging.

What if there is no one in the restaurant? On one trip to Shanghai, I took a train to Luodianzhen. I had no idea what Luodianzhen was or whether it was worth going to. I simply went to the Shànghǎi Huǒchē Zhàn (the main station, dumbo!), picked a terminus that was closer than Lhasa and took pot luck.

When I arrived at the terminus—I knew it was the terminus because I was the only one left on the train and the train driver walked past glaring at me—I found myself in a rather quaint, tiny town—probably only four million residents: maybe seven million. Who knows in China?

I wandered round till I found some shops. After rushing through the market (they were strangling chickens and ripping the skins off frogs) I found an air-conditioned café that looked clean. It was empty. Ignoring my own rules, I walked in.

The waiter, the dishwasher and the cook all stared at me. One hesitantly handed me the menu as if it contained state secrets. (Should we give this to the gweilo?) I looked at it bemusedly. The waiter grabbed it off me and turned it back to front.

‘Good,’ thought I, ‘the English section is in the back’.

It wasn’t. I was holding it upside down—and I had paid good money for those damned Mandarin classes! I looked lost. The cook suddenly smiled, held up his finger and said ‘ah’. It might well have meant idiot in Mandarin but I know my ahs!

He raced out to the kitchen. In a remarkably short time, he returned with a fish, a chicken, half a pig, several types of greens and a bowl of white rice. He dumped the lot triumphantly on the table in their uncooked glory.

OK! The rice was cooked! The table groaned under the weight... I smiled and pointed at the chicken and the fish, thinking that a smallish slice of chicken and a middling piece of fish with greens and rice would be nice.

To make sure he understood, I made a sawing motion across both massive beasts.

After twelve minutes and thirteen mini-cups of tea, the cook, the dishwasher and waiter returned carrying one whole chicken, one two-kilogram fish, a dozen plates of vegetables and a bucket of rice.

By that stage someone unknown from amongst the cook, dishwasher and waiter had contacted someone they knew who spoke English, sort of. The English speaker and half the town had crowded into the restaurant and watched expectantly as the emperor’s feast arrived by forklift and was dumped on my table.

I explained to my new English-speaking friend—a delightful young man called Wangxi who was keen to show me the town when I had finished my repast—that I could not possibly eat all this food. He explained that he and his friends ate that much regularly but that if I couldn’t, they would help! It has always amazed me how Asians can eat so much and remain so small. I think it is the fact that most of the food is healthy—not deep-fried—and is washed down with tea: not wine, beer or coke. 

After I gave up on the third chicken thigh, everyone tucked in. It was quite a party. And it cost less than ten dollars US! To this day, that has to be my favorite Chinese restaurant.

After the magnificent repast, led by Wangxi, almost everyone accompanied me round the town to show me the sights: shops, markets, a bus terminal and a man-made lake. Wow! And here was I wondering why I was the only tourist. Believe me, it was one of the highlights of my travels. Being taken round and shown the nooks and crannies of how people lived and having people smile with delight as I showed interest in what I saw is always a wondrous thing. This wasn’t Shanghai city: this was a small town on its outskirts.

I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Luodianzhen and I will never forget that meal, the kindness with which it was served and the pleasure with which it was enjoyed by so many! To say nothing of its size!

But let’s get back to my main thesis:  Malaysian culinary supremacy. A favorite Chinese eatery of mine was in Subang Jaya in Malaysia. Sadly, it closed down in 2009 when they could not find a cook good enough to maintain its standards. It was not one of those pretentious red and gold mausoleums renowned for drowning fish and high prices. It was alive. It was always crowded and noisy which is the mark of a good Chinese eatery. If a Chinese restaurant is too quiet, you can hear yourself (and your companions) eat, which is not the most pleasant feature of Chinese dining. En masse, it is like the massed choruses in Albert Hall persecuting the Hallelujah Chorus whilst wearing scuba diving masks filled with thick pea soup.

My Subang Jaya choice had the usual dishes. Now I am one for the exotic. I love to try new food. I delight in the delicate flavors of oriental herbs and spices, usually subtly used to complement rather than drown the taste of the fish or the chicken. You know the ones: five spice powder, cumin, ginger, garlic, star anise and the all time favorite, MSG: but this one had a traditional dish that went back centuries: Marmite Prawns! I protested to my Chinese colleagues. Marmite? For God’s sake! But I tried it. And I liked it.

That is another lesson. Never argue with an Asian about food. Never say ‘no’. Eat! But Marmite prawns? And never ask: ‘What is in this?’

Mind you, they had other interesting dishes as well. I ordered the 'Chicken Surprise'. The waiter brought the meal served in a pot with a lid. Just as my partner was about to serve himself, something inside the pot lifted up the lid. Two beady eyes looked at him. Visibly shaken, he slammed the lid down.

‘Did you see that?' he asked.

Rather perturbed, I called the waiter over to demand an explanation.

'What you order?' demanded the waiter. 

‘Chicken Surprise,’ I said.

'Ah! So sorry,' said the waiter looking inside, 'I bring you Peeking Duck.

Zàijiàn.

Sadly, Malaysia is going the way of all flesh as far as its food tastes are concerned. Long lines form outside McDonalds and KFC as increasingly large teenagers and pudgy children gorge on US Fast Food. Personally, I think American fast food chains are all part of a CIA plot to dominate the rest of the world by reducing their capacity to fight. But sadly, that theory holds few calories. After all, by the time the rest of the world catches up with America’s obesity limits, even their pilots will not be able to fit into the tight cockpits of fighter jets.

Malaysia, like so many other Asian countries, does not need to turn to the US for inspiration as it too strives to become Obesia. In a country where people drive from Kuala Lumpur over two hundred kilometers to Ipoh just to go to the Foh San coffee shop for Dim Sum you have to ask how dim some people must be!

These days Malaysia has an often very visible prosperity problem and whilst expensive restaurants are experiencing belt tightening as hordes desert them for the desserts at coffee shops, health experts suggest that there are other good reasons to curb the widespread use of fats and sugars in local food.

Malaysia has one of the highest rates of diabetes, strokes and heart disease in Southeast Asia.

Why? As 2010 dawned, was it the rising affluence? That could so easily change. Was it the sedentary lifestyle? Could it be western fast food? If that was the case, maybe the lines outside McDonalds might get smaller. With the recession in 2010 they did. Even the fat—whoops! fast—food chains felt the recession and offered ‘lunchtime’ specials. I kept hoping that if things didn’t improve, you would see ‘all day specials’, or preferably, bankruptcy.

This leads me to another theory. While the experts say it has more to do with how much we eat and how little we exercise, we should take the lead from America once more: it’s not my fault: blame someone else. Mind you, even without western fast food, Some Malaysian food falls into the ‘too much not too good for you’ category. How did this national obesity tragedy befall Malaysia? Let me explain.

In the beginning God covered the earth with good things like kangkong (spinach), petai (beans), chillies and timun (cucumber). He created vegetables of many colours: green, yellow and red, so that Man and Woman would live long and healthy lives.

Then Satan created Nasi Lemak (literally fatty fried rice) and Sago Pearls Dessert. The Man chose the Nasi Lemak. The Woman chose the Sago Pearls dessert. And Satan said: 'Would you both like more santan (coconut cream) with those?' And the Woman said: 'Yes please!' and the Man said ‘Yes please!’ And lo, they both gained a few kilograms.

God also created healthy yogurt so that the Woman might keep the figure that the Man found so fair and alluring. Satan followed up and created white flour from the wheat and gula Melaka (sugar syrup) from the cane and combined them deliciously.

And the Woman and the Man both ate too much. The Woman went from size 8 to size 14. The Man took to wearing sarongs instead of trousers because it was hard to find trousers in his size.

So God said: 'Try my fresh sambal kangkung salad’. The Man turned up his nose. The Woman turned up her nose. Satan presented them with a large plate of crispy skinned chicken with garlic prawns on the side. And the Man and the Woman devoured it all, upsizing with seconds and unfastened their belts following their repast.

God then said: 'I have created olive oil in which to cook the healthy vegetables’. Satan responded by bringing forth palm oil for frying coconut king prawns, butter-dipped lobster chunks and pisang goreng (fried bananas). The Man ate copiously of it and his cholesterol levels went through the roof. The Woman also over ate and went shopping for larger clothing sizes once more.

Then God brought forth the potato, a vegetable which brims with potassium and good nutrition and is naturally low in fat. Satan peeled off the healthful skin and sliced the starchy centre into chips and deep-fried them in palm oil, serving them in cardboard cups and adding copious quantities of salt. And the Man and the Woman ate several up-sized helpings and both the Man and the Woman had to book two seats each on the Firefly flight to Penang to attend the laksa festival.

God then created gyms so that his Children might lose those extra kilos. But Satan came forth with cable TV with remote controls so that the Man and the Woman would not have to get out of their armchairs to change channels.

And the Man and the Woman watched TV for hours wearing designer stretch jogging suits.

God then created lean beef so that the Man and the Woman might consume fewer calories and still satisfy their appetite. Satan created KFC, Ramli burgers and McDonald’s $5.90 midday lunch specials.

Then Satan said, 'You want fries with that?' And the Man replied: 'Yes! And super size 'em!' And Satan said: 'It is good’. And the Man and the Woman went into cardiac arrest.

God sighed...and created by-pass surgery.

And then...Satan chuckled and created public hospitals.

And that, I suppose, is where it all started…