I had to write about this because I just spent the past hour or so in a fruitless venture to attempt to put some items in my fridge that aren't terrible, processed garbage that doesn't really even qualify as food but somehow manages to have more carbs and sodium than you should likely have in a day.
This probably isn't limited to Vietnam and Thailand, the two countries that I have spent the most time living in, in this part of the world, but it is just so frustrating that the food economy exists like this.
I want to dispel a myth that a lot of people have about this part of the world and that is that Asian food is somehow good for you. Any country's food can be good for you but most countries gravitate towards cheap garbage food that is really bad for you and SE Asia is not exempt from this. You honestly think that fried rice, spring rolls, and Pad Thai are good for you? Go ahead and look the nutritional information up for those things and you will find that you may as well eat Big Macs because the health benefits (or lack thereof) are essentially the same. In many cases they are worse for you.
So when I decided about 2 months ago - I honestly don't remember when I started - that I was going to start eating clean it suddenly dawned on me that this is extremely difficult to pull off. Basically everywhere sells processed crap and even restaurants that advertise "healthy food" are selling deep fried version of something that would be healthy if they were to prepare it literally any other way. So why do they do it like this? Well, because it is really easy, fast, and cheap to chuck a bunch of whatever into some boiling palm oil (one of the worst oils but also the cheapest) and slap it on top of some lukewarm rice than it is for them to make something that takes some time.
The most famous dish in Vietnam is probably Pho (pronounced "fuh" not "foe") but herein we run into the same problem once something is mass produced. If it is cheap, they are using bullshit noodles, msg, and now you've taken something that was once healthy and you've turned it into a carb nightmare that has about the same nutritional value as a double quarter pounder with cheese. The average street Pho is estimated to contain 60-100 grams of carbs and a mere 20 grams of protein. Basically it is the opposite of healthy despite what people looking at it might think.
It's still better than sucking down a extra value meal with large friend and a Coke, but healthy? Not really.
getting back to my specific frustration this morning ans I was walking around looking specifically for greek yogurt - a product that appears sporadically in stores here then for some reason goes away, sometimes for months at a time.
In the meantime though, the markets that sell this stuff supplement their now empty yogurt shelves with sugary processed crap that for whatever reason, doesn't ever seem to run out.
There is a yogurt company here called Da Lat and for whatever reason, the shops are NEVER out of this stuff. Anytime I go into a shop there are hundreds of containers of this stuff. However, this yogurt contains added sugar, virtually no protein - which is the opposite of what I am looking for once again. I'm sure they are doing the best that they can (or what they found is marketable) but at the same time this product is missing out on most of the health benefits of what people who are concerned about their health eat yogurt for in the first place. It has nearly as much fat in it as it does protein and therefore, I am not going to eat it.
I think this is a very strong reflection of the society that we live in though because we get told ALL THE TIME that we are supposed to eat certain things like whole foods and things with natural ingredients but when you go into a store they almost always don't have these things in stock. I don't know what Frito Lay is doing so well but those guys seem to have an endless supply of Doritos. I have never seen a shop run out of potato chips / crisps. But most of the time if I go into any store and want to buy some fruit or vegetables, they are always sold out.
So if the idea is to make money in these shops, wouldn't it make at least some sense to restock the products that are constantly sold out? All of these stores that I go to have a point of sale / inventory system, so it shouldn't be a huge surprise to the staff when they run out of it. The stores I went into today had cookies, sweets, and chips piled up to the roof but a produce section that was just pathetic to look at. Of course there were Snickers and Coca-Cola in great enough quantities to give half the town diabetes.
I wonder if the western world is like this as well. I would imagine that it is seeing as how the obesity rates over there are higher than here by far. We are told to eat healthy but then it is just far more difficult to actually obtain these items. I can, 24-hours a day, get a burger and fries with no issue but if I want a salad, or some fruit, or even just a piece of meat that isn't deep fried, it is a difficult process.