Food Banks And What The West Could Learn From Asian Cooking

There is a lot of talk about obesity and healthy eating in the West. There is also a lot of talk about rising food prices, food banks, unemployment, benefits cuts and other austerity measures sparking dubious claims from millionaire, silver-spooned Tories that they could survive on £53 a week, while maintaining a reasonably nutritious and varied diet.

Now comes the news that a staggering 500,000 people in the UK - the seventh richest country in the world, it’s worth remembering - are relying on food banks to survive as welfare cuts bite and food prices continue to rise (having already soared by 35% over the past five years, far outstripping wage increases).

And the way things are going, it’s only likely to get worse. As John Harris wrote this week in The Guardian about the growing use of food banks in Britain, there is a perception that “hunger is something that happens only to the poor and unfortunate overseas. It’s now here: outside everyone’s door, gnawing away, ruining lives.”

Overseas places like Cambodia, for instance, where I am currently working. A third-world country ranked as one of the poorest in the world, where many villagers struggle to get by on less than $2 a day.

There is no doubt that even the poorest Britons live a much better life than the poorest Cambodians. But it makes sense that the hundreds of thousands of Britons now struggling with “destitution, hardship, and hunger on a large scale”, as key poverty charities warn, could learn a thing or two from SE Asia’s most vulnerable - who for years have had to cope with extreme hunger, and have become skilled at getting the most out of the little food they have.

A good start would be removing the ‘meat and two veg’ mantra and embracing an Asian diet and Asian cooking techniques - none more so than the wok: an extremely versatile cooking pot that can be used to fry, steam, and braise, and is very useful for serving up tasty, nutritious food on a tight budget.

Asian cooking, in general, uses more fish and has a higher ratio of vegetables per serving - and vegetables are often overlooked in the meat-obsessed West as an excellent way to naturally boost flavour. Likewise, wok cooking uses little oil, making it healthier. It’s also blindingly quick - meaning it takes less of a chunk out of gas or electricity bills. And I say this without sarcasm or irony in these days where you can’t switch on the telly without hearing the word sustainability - something that may help save the planet.

As food and fuel become more scarce, populations grow, and climate change pushes up temperatures and leads to more flooding, making traditional staples like rice less and less of a staple, people will be forced to eat less meat and more vegetables, fruit, and perhaps insects - which happen to be a very good source of protein and nourishment. It’s unavoidable - there aren’t enough resources to go round as it is.

People in the West could do themselves a lot of favours if they simply ate less, and saw meat as less of a main ingredient and more of a flavouring, as it is in SE Asia. When I arrived in Cambodia in 2011, I tipped the airport scales at a whopping and technically obese 93kg. I’m now 77kg, and feel a lot better for it.

Yes, I miss meat feasts and dirty kebabs. But after a while your stomach and appetite changes, it takes less food to fill your belly, and the endless discussions about double cheese burgers and monstrous steaks leave you frankly bored, if not a little disgusted, by the gluttony so often espoused on foodie havens like Twitter.

Read any interview with someone surviving on food aid in the US or Europe and they will say the same thing - that they have been forced to abandon, or heavily cut down on, meat for cheaper ingredients like pasta, rice, noodles, pulses, cereals, and vegetables.

Over the next few blogs, I’m going to post a few recipes I’ve picked up on my travels through SE Asia - not gourmet meals, far from it, but delicious all the same. They are meals that can be made in minutes and are extremely cheap to make.

It’s one of the many things people in the West could learn from the far flung East, along with swapping toilet paper for bum guns, the importance of families and spirituality, and being less obsessed with celebrity, to name but a few.

The first is a dish that comes from a great Chinese-Cambodian street food stall in Phnom Penh. It’s called char trey cor compong (fried tinned fish). Doesn’t sound great does it, but it’s a wonderful meal. All you need is a tin of mackerel in tomato sauce (or tinned pilchards or sardines), tomato ketchup (tuk peng pong - the Hong Kong influence in the dish), onions, chillies, rice, and a few minutes with a wok.

CHAR TREY COR COMPONG

(serves 2)

400g tin of mackerel in tomato sauce

1 large or two medium onions

3 tablespoons tomato ketchup

2 spring onions

1 teaspoon fish sauce

Salt, Pepper, Sugar

Juice of two limes

Two red bird eye chillies

1/2 tablespoon vegetable oil

As with all wok dishes, it’s important to prep the ingredients first - the best cooks over here say 90% of the cooking is done on the chopping board, and 10% in the wok. But they also say the blacker the wok, the better the chef, so knife skills are very good by that stage.

Open the tinned mackerel, and carefully fork out the fish and put on a plate. Half fill the tin with water, and using a wooden spoon scrape up the tomato sauce from the sides and bottom. Chop the onion in half, then finely slice. Cut the white part of each spring onion into two pieces, then finely chop the green part to use as a garnish. Finely slice the chillies and put in a small saucer or dipping bowl. Cut the limes into six pieces, and squeeze each piece into a bowl.

Heat the wok over a high flame until the metal begins to smoke, then add the vegetable oil. Toss in the sliced onion, and stir continuously with the wooden spoon until the onion is soft but not browned - this will take about two minutes. Then throw in the liquid from the tin, and the spring onion whites, and boil for a minute.

Add the ketchup, lime juice, and fish sauce, and boil for another 30 seconds, topping up with a little more water if necessary, until you have a sauce about the thickness of double cream. Add salt, sugar, and ground black pepper to taste.

Turn off the flame and put the fish in the wok, and cover with the sauce. Put the lid on the wok and then leave for a minute. The fish should be warmed through but not hot. Tip the fish on to a flat serving dish and scatter with the spring onion greens (the stall uses chopped Chinese chives as a garnish - so use those if you’re lucky enough to have them). Serve with sticky rice and the saucer of chopped chillies.

MORE: Eating Duck Embryos And Cow Guts 

:: My new, bestselling food book Down And Out In South East Asia is an adventure story, spiked with a heavy dose of backpacker noir, through the eateries, street food stalls, and hazy bars of Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Jamie Oliver’s Twitter Account Hacked With Bogus Diet Adverts

Overweight healthy eating guru Jamie Oliver has had his Twitter account hacked with an advert for a diet fad that claims users can lose “23lbs of belly fat in one month”.

The celebrity cook tweeted a series of links to a bogus woman’s health magazine advertising the weight-shedding benefits of something called the Garcinia Cambogia bean diet.

His fans quickly noticed the hack, and minutes later Oliver deleted the messages, which said: “Lose 22lbs. of fffat in 29 days” followed by a link.

Oliver then sent out a tweet to his 3.3 million followers, saying: “Whoa sorry guys looks like i got hacked!! Sorry to all looking in to it now. JOXX”

Others used the opportunity to poke fun at the TV cook, with Luke Lewis writing: “Jamie Oliver's tweets are more lucid than usual this morning.”

An hour later, and without any apparent irony, Oliver then sent out a Twitter message to his fans plugging a new “naughty, filthy” chocolate cake for one of his many restaurant chains.

“Help me guys I'm Just about to put this chocolate cake on a menu for Jamies italian & its a really painfully good naughty filthy elegant chocolate dish what can I call it ???

“It's gotta be simple but a bit slutty any ideas ? I want a naughty play of death by chocolate ... Chocolate ???? Any ideas greatly appreciated and don't hold back I think it deserves to be a big rude love #jamie xxx”.

What a waste of a golden opportunity though, as chef Neil Rankin put it - breaking into Oliver’s Twitter account and just posting spam.

Restaurant Conman Jailed For Putting Pubic Hair In Curry

I've often found it incredible the lengths some people will go to get a free drink or meal. When I started my first job working behind a bar, I was warned about a customer who was renowned for trying to cadge free pints.

He was known all around the village where I grew up. A huge, button-eyed man with the longest eyebrows I've ever seen. He always wore a grubby tweed jacket covered in fag burns, and spoke with a wonderfully-rehearsed Woosterian accent.

On my first night, he pulled up in his invalid carriage and ordered a pint of real ale. He sniffed it, held it up to the light like a real ale enthusiast in a fisherman's jumper, then turned his back to the bar briefly and downed half the pint.

He turned back with foam on his nose and a look of absolute horror on his face, coughing and spluttering, and pointing at the now cloudy pint, and demanded another one. He pulled the stunt again, but this time I spotted him dropping in a pinch of flour from his pocket.

But it was small beer compared with the fraudster jailed today for trying to get a free curry from the Jamal Indian restaurant in Middlesbrough - by doctoring his lamb bhuna with pubic hair.

Lee Tyers, 40, from Yarm, was caught on CCTV putting his hands down his trousers as he sat in the restaurant and then garnishing his food.

He told staff he'd found the hair in his food in a bid to get out of paying his £39.55 bill.

Restaurant owner Jamal Chowdhury told the court he'd known Tyers for 18 years, but was owed £110 for unpaid meals.

The crook told staff he had cash to pay, before he and a friend ordered two lamb bhunas, pilau rice, naan bread, lager, a chapati and a shish kebab.

The pair ate most of their food, and then Tyers complained to a waiter about finding pubic hair in his bhuna. They then left the curry house without paying.

Mr Chowdhury told Teesside Magistrates' Court: "I told him all the staff have black hair and this is brown - it’s not our hair."

Tyers was found guilty of false representation and jailed for two weeks and ordered to pay £39.55 compensation.

MORE: Why You Should Never Send Back Food In A Restaurant

Why Michael Pollan Is Wrong About Sending Back Steaks In Restaurants

I like American journalist and current media darling Michael Pollan, and the simple approach to food he advocates. In this era of wall-to-wall cooking shows, where former supermodels can do a couple of years at catering school and emerge as celebrity chefs teaching the nation to bake while older, far more experienced cooks are left on the shelf, it’s a breath of fresh air.

A well-researched, beautifully-written breath of fresh air that may motivate even the laziest, crisp-munching foodie to turn off the telly and actually cook a meal themselves, rather than wondering who’s going to be knocked out next, or tweeting about how James Martin looks like an owl in a Noel Gallagher wig, and can’t read the autocue (alright, I was guilty of that one).

I love Pollan’s advice about how we should all eat out less and cook for ourselves. I like his proselytising about how we should be less greedy, and eat more plants. I like his simple guidelines for eating - “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car”. I like the tales of his cookery experiments in his new book Cooked - a book being feted on both sides of the Atlantic as some sort of born again Bible in this age of unnecessarily-fussy recipes and long-run-out-of-ideas food programmes about building giant mince pies for bemused Greggs-goers in the centre of Birmingham.

But there is one thing he is very wrong about - and that is his views on ordering well done steaks in restaurants. On first sight, Pollan seems to be on to something. He urges us to ensure the quality of the meat - provided you like your steak well done or medium-well, and not a bloody hunk of seared flesh like most people - by ordering it rare, and then, and this is the cunning bit, sending it back to be cooked more.

That way, he says, you can guarantee the quality, and perhaps in these horsian days, the provenance of the meat. The logic being that devious chefs will try to pass off the nastiest pieces by serving it to the idiots who ask for their steaks well done, or ‘ruined’ in chefs’ cant.

There is truth in this. I’ve worked in restaurants where gnarly, green-tinged, everyone-has-a-sniff, about-to-go-in-staff-food steaks are reserved for customers who favour cremated meat. And it’s not just because it’s easier to get away with - it’s disgust. You see, chefs hate overcooking meat. “Fucking plebs!” they’ll be ranting as three orders for well done come in on table one. There is no chance to showcase their semi-mythical cooking talents if the meat is grey, and dry as Gandhi’s sandal.

But there is something chefs hate much more than having to ruin a lovely piece of meat, and that’s the humiliation, dented pride, and battered ego of having food sent back to the kitchen. It causes uproar. The restaurant is afraid to relay the message to the head chef, and the lowly commis in the brigade will make sideways glances and snigger. “Big bollocks has fucked up!” they’ll be thinking.

As revenge, I’ve seen chefs take a beautiful piece of returned steak and throw it in the deep-fat fryer until it’s well done, such is the disdain for people who hand back their beloved food. And I’ve heard of, and seen, far worse incidents.

On one occasion, I was working in a gastropub in Cornwall when an eye fillet came back. The chef ranted and slammed plates on the pass, and ran around the kitchen for a few minutes finding fault with everything, and quickly trying to pass off his perceived negligence by bullying the lower ranks while the steak sat there on the pass, oozing blood and greyish gobs of juice.

He then picked up the steak, pulled down his trousers, and wiped his arse with it. I apologise if you’re eating at this point, but I’m using it as an example of what can happen when you hand food back to a kitchen. And it’s not just steaks, of course. Troublesome customers may be munching through their just-returned salad oblivious to the saliva, or worse, in the chef’s special sauce, or the bogey hidden in the leaves, or the urine in the mussels etc etc.

I learned a lot in the time I spent cooking in restaurants, not least that I had a huge amount to learn, and that being able to throw a decent dinner party, or prepare a deep, deep pudding for Egg and Toad in a TV studio, is absolutely no use in preparing you for the rigours of a professional kitchen. All bright-eyed amateurs discover the same - that they are about as useful to the tattooed bunch of leather-fingered limpet berries around them as a snooze button on a smoke alarm.

But one thing I did learn is never hand food back. It’s just not worth it. The thought of what might be in there, what your soup might have been doctored with, will more than take away any enjoyment of the meal. Whenever a waiter asks how my meal is, I always mumble some platitude even if it’s fucking awful. And if it’s great, I let them know that too. But I never send food back to a kitchen. Never!

Pollan is right about the ability to see the quality of a steak if it’s rare, and how overcooking covers up a multitude of sins. But the trust he puts in the deranged characters you often find in kitchens is a touch naive. I hope his steaks, or those of his readers, never come back matted with sweat and other horrors that weren’t there on first arrival, but returning food to guarantee its quality is ludicrous advice.

:: My new, bestselling food book Down And Out In South East Asia is an adventure story, spiked with a heavy dose of backpacker noir, through the eateries, street food stalls, and hazy bars of Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam.