Have you ever had that feeling of being cheated after a large chinese meal ? You were close to bursting point just an hour ago, and now you feel hungry again. How can that be when you’ve had so much to eat ? Well, science tells us the people who were raised on western style diets require fat to feel satiated. The fat sends all the right messages to the brain and says “Yup, that’s good, I feel full now”. If that lovely fat is missing from even the biggest meal, we won’t get that feeling and are left wanting.
In Asia, I discovered the same thing, but it was a different substance that triggeres the brain to switch on the “stop eating, now” messages. That substance is, of course, rice. When you are raised to eat rice 3 times a day — breakfast, lunch and supper — you’ll won’t feel like you’ve had your fill until you munch on a bit of rice at some point.
Several years ago I wondered through the streets of Medan, a sprawling city of 2 million people in Sumatra, Indonesia. A local boy offered to take me round and show me the sights in exchange for letting him practise his English. We came by a newly opened Fast-food restaurant, like KFC or McD, where the affluent middle class takes their children and maidservants to show off their comparative wealth. Western food chains are quite out the financial reach of most people in Indonesia. This boy, who earned his keep by patching flat tyres at road junctions, was no difference.
Although he’d spent his childhood patrolling the very road junction where two glitzy new restaurants were vying for costumers, he had never tried western food. He said it makes his stomach hurt and it won’t give him energy. Nevertheless, he gave in to the lure of burger, chips and chicken nuggets and even found some of it quite yummy. However, during the entire time he kept glancing outside. I put it down to him keeping an eye on the road for stranded motorbike riders cursing at burst rubber tubes. But he was actually checking whether their was a little food stall outside where he could get his fill.
When we left the place he darted over to the the nearest stall and bought a packet of rice wrapped in banana leaves. “This, my food. Is good” he uttered and I realized that his meal hadn’t ended until he tucked into that little packet. I can’t tell how much of that programming is caused by being accustomed to a different diet during childhood or whether it was his ingrained belief that only his mum’s food was the proper way to eat.
See more photos of Asian food and markets in the album below …
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The practice of shark finning (where sharks have their fins cut off while still alive and are thrown back in the water to die) is brutal, wasteful, and often, illegal. A web search for shark finning will show you in mere minutes how terrible the practice is.
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