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.

Pilchards On Ghost

The suffocating claustrophobia of the kitchen was getting to me. Whenever I could snatch an hour or two away in the idle period between lunch and evening service, I'd head up to Porbeagle Isle. I don't know what I was looking for. Perhaps I was just hoping my life would change somehow.

I'd walk along the darkening sands, the wintry wind whipping my ears, and mounds of seaweed piled up at high tide. There were neon ropes, plastic bottles, feathers, spades, and a pair of swimming trunks. Some of the seaweed was shaped like clubs. If you looked closer there were dead crabs, mussels and limpets among the debris.

I followed the sands to the mouth of the estuary, where Atlantic salmon and sea trout swam to spawn. There were narrow caves with plastic lighters wedged into crevices. And there were steps that led up to the mansions overlooking Porbeagle Isle. They had metal gates and no-nonsense signs. One said: “Private – don’t be caught by tide. Guard dogs beyond!” I’d rather take my chances with the dogs, I thought.

I walked up to the ruined hever hut on top of the island. It was just a shell with graffiti scratched into the brickwork. I thought about the fisherman who had sat there watching the sea all those years ago, raising the alarm when the waves turned silver. Then the boats would go out and surround the pilchards. Millions of fish were salted and packed into barrels. Then the fish stopped coming, the tourist information sign said.

Half-way down was the Silver Sea Inn, a crooked building with stable-like doors. The sign said it dated from 1396 and was “haunted by the ghost of an Elizabethan smuggler called Tom Trevisick, who was shot dead by customs men”.

I ordered a pint. I was the only one in there. The landlord was practising a Christmas carol, and tried it out on me. He’d changed the words - it was all about a man dressing up in women’s clothing. I sat by the fire, wishing he’d go away.

He stopped singing suddenly and pointed.

“Stare at the bricks to the right of the fire. Can you see it? Can you see Old Tom’s face?”

I stared, and the landlord danced around behind me. Slowly I made out two dark patches for eyes and then a mouth. Then he pointed again.

“Look at the brickwork on the left! You’re supposed to be able to see the face of the customs man chasing him!”

The grey stone formed into incomprehensible shapes, but this time no face. I tried again and shook my head.

“No, I’ve never seen it either,” he laughed. “I think you’ve got to be pissed to see that!"

He came back with two more pints.

"But Old Tom, he’s here alright," he went on. "Sometimes I find myself talking to him when I’m on my own. I always know when he’s there. He plays all sorts of tricks on me – I think he was quite a prankster in his day.

“When I first took over the pub, I was cleaning up and saw something out of the corner of my eye. I looked round and there was a lime in mid-air. It hadn’t just fallen off the counter and on to the floor...it was about a foot above the counter. If the lime had just rolled off the bar, it would have gone down wouldn’t it! It wouldn’t have gone up!”

“Come on...” I said. He was beginning to unnerve me, and I still had to walk back on my own through the dark.

“I tell you I saw it with my own eyes! I said ‘Tom, what are you doing to me?’”

“What did he say?”

The landlord looked thoughtful for a second and slightly offended.

“Well he might have said something, in his own way. And then he started paying me more visits. I’m not afraid of him though, it’s nice having someone around. But Old Tom’s a real nuisance sometimes. I hear him downstairs in the toilets, and I say ‘Tom, what the hell are you doing down there?’

“You know sometimes I go down there when I open up and the walls are all covered with wads of wet toilet paper! That’s why I never bother to clean the bogs at the end of the night – you don’t know what it’s going to be like in the morning.”

I ordered another pint and drank deeply. I was desperate for the toilet.

“But it’s useful when there’s a stock take. If there’s anything missing, I say ‘well, old Tom had that one!’”

I finished the pint and planned to get out of there immediately, when the latch on the inside of the door started jiggling frantically. I looked up, and then back at the landlord.

His eyes widened like a cartoon mouse. The jiggling got more severe and a weight was pushing against the door. I could hear murmuring voices. It might have been olde English.

“Never fails to amaze me,” said the landlord, leaping up from his chair. He lifted the latch then hid behind the door. There was another push, the latch rattled, and this time the door flew open, and a startled, well-dressed couple fell into the pub.

“Arrrrrrr!” yelled the landlord, emerging from behind the door with his fingers held up like claws.

They darted back and then recovered their composure. The landlord was a complete lunatic, and I never went there again.