HAVE YOU EDUCATED YOUR CHILDREN TO FEED THEIR OWN TUMMY WITH HEATHY FOOD?

By Chef Sarawak@NZ Chef Si

      

    It is unavoidable that your children will eat out with their friends and classmates, but have you educated them to feed their own tummy with healthy food? Do they know what they pay for is worthy and healthy? Or they have no knowledge at all?

      Why I write this article? For over weeks when I worked as a chef, after I saw so many unhygienic mise en place which I got no authority to stop such practice, after I was asked to prepare so many unhealthy ingredients, after I cooked so many servings of fish balls, meat balls or mixture of both from the frozen packages over a lunch period, finally my toleration time bomb exploded, my conscience took over me as a professionally trained chef, the menu was not designed by me, so I quit the next day.     

      We can’t stop some unethical Asian chefs working in restaurants in western countries, the worst are some of them were trained in the western culinary schools but deliberately went against the western culinary school teaching just to prove that their own Asian food and tradition are better, ironically they only aimed for profit making but sold unhealthy food to customers, but as a chef, I have my obligation to educate my children, my nephews and nieces what kind of food may not be healthy for them if they eat out.                                   

    Last Sunday, I deliberately took the notorious AGS pigeon boy to a Newmarket western restaurant for lunch. I deliberately let him chose what he wanted, immediately he chose the Greek meatballs. 

      Fine, young kids and chats simply love meat balls and fish balls if they didn’t play any ball! I let him ordered it, and his food education began on the Greek meatball. He finally learned the health issue and choice why he could choose to eat freshly made meatballs served in western restaurants but not the manufactured fish balls and meat balls usually sold in Asian restaurants, I told him there is only an exception that he may eat fish or meat balls in an Asian restaurant with an Asian chef who is highly educated, cultivated, have respect for himself, his own culture and other cultures as well, and have conscience and can guarantee his fish or meat doesn’t leave it to defrost at room temperature for the whole day and then using herbs, sesame oil or spice and chemical to cover up the rotting smell.

      Then I deliberately order a piece of steak placed on a piece of ciabatta, I asked him if he rather ate a piece of tough cheap sirloin steak in a western restaurant or a piece of even cheaper cost price but tenderized skirt steak in a Chinese restaurant. He asked me why? I told him the steak will be tender unless it is the very expensive A5 Wagyu or NZ grass fed beef, but usually, these marbled steaks would only cook to rare.

      I advised him to stay at home eating his Asian or Chinese food, it could be tasteless, tough but it would be always healthy and clean, and if he really needs to go out eating with his friends, he can choose the cheap $5 Domino pizza or he can choose to go eat in a decent western café where honest food is served. He asked me why, I told him because as most western restaurants if they mean chicken sauce, it means fresh chicken stock with lots of added vegetable and bouquet garni being reduced and even with roasted jus to prepare chicken sauce, in western sauce there was hardly any sugar added but only salt and pepper, whereas in most Chinese cafes, to prepare a particular sauce, the Chinese chefs would add so much sugar, MSG, salt, chicken essence, different kinds of soy sauce, ketchup or vinegar and water to prepare a sauce with little onion, garlic or ginger, this sauce prepared either from sugar or canned seasoning would be added to the meat or seafood which were all marinated with sodium carbonate. The rebellious teenage pigeon boy argued to me that it’s no harm to eat sodium carbonate like the Chinese chef "told me" it’s the “edible kind of sodium carbonate” when I showed him the Wikipedia said it’s a kind of cleansing agent. So, I challenged the pigeon boy why not I would buy 10 kg of the beef skirt and he would marinate it with sodium carbonate without a glove, immediately he sensed a danger from my tone.

      I met someone who told me his Chinese friend opened a restaurant in Australia and the deep fry business was so good, he mocked that his friends used MSG, sugar and sodium carbonate to marinate his chicken and used MSG in his batter but white people didn’t know it and they thought his chicken was so tender and tasted so good.

        Well, Chinese would argue that millions of Chinese have been eating meat marinated and noodles mixed with alkali over generations, well, it is your choice in life of what to feed into your own tummy, just like cigarettes hazard warning, if you are educated about what is healthy and unhealthy food, you have a choice, but if you are not educated, you can eat whatever you like and when you grow up even if you were trained in a western culinary school, the minute you step back into a Chinese kitchen, you were back to zero time one equal to zero! My experience taught me a male head chef is a chauvinist pig in a Chinese restaurant, a king in a Chinese kitchen, as if he cooked a simple dish or marinated a bowl of meat, he needed 3 assistants to help him so he could sense his superiority.  In short, what to feed into your children’s tummy is an important family education that could evolve their minds to accept other cultures’ goodness as well!