Food is relatively cheap in Hong Kong. It's cheaper than in Amsterdam, but the quality of the ingredients is somewhat questionable. It costs me between 23 and 29 HKD to order food at work. They deliver it in a Styrofoam box, along with chopsticks, a spoon and a smelly napkin. By food I mean rice with meat or noodles with meat. You have to get used to it as rice is their equivalent of bread.
I often see how they deliver meat to the restaurants when I go to work in the morning. They bring in chicken meat in a barrel.. the same blue dirty plastic barrel each morning. Chicken carcases are stacked just high enough to allow the person pushing the barrel to push it by holding onto the chickens. I peeked into some restaurant kitchens and it's not pretty. Whatever you do, please only eat thoroughly cooked food at the restaurant if you plan to visit Hong Kong. If you want to eat fresh seafood, make sure you're buying it from a sanitary place, or else you run the risk of getting hepatitis A.
There are some categories of restaurants which I find disgusting. I'm talking about the kinds of restaurants that display ducks at the entrance and which radiate a stench of fat. These are cheap restaurants where locals eat incredibly fat food. Just take a look at this picture:
In Europe (and especially in Romania, where I come from), we eat a lot of vegetables. Unfortunately in Hong Kong all vegetables are imported, expensive and (I suspect) full of hormones. A few days ago I was reading that the US will import all the food for their athletes during the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics: "chickens on sale here are so full of hormones that athletes would test positive for steroids if they were to eat them" (by here they mean China not Hong Kong, but you get the idea). Anyway I find the quote quite ironic, taking into account US's track record of "healthy" food.
Most of the products in convenience stores are imported from US, Australia or other countries. From within the US they seem to import most food from California. Starting with wine and ending with the huge freak-mutant strawberries that I bought yesterday. They don't even have a lot of cows here as dairy products are imported, with only one exception. I especially suffer when it comes to yogurt, as they only sell it in small cups here, with obscene prices.
Finally, they have this fixation of making food taste sweet. The bread that I buy here is sweet, the food that I order at work is sometimes sweet, the "western" style soup is sweet, and the "Sour Cream" they have here is sweet. I'm serious, it says sour cream right there on the box but they say you can use it as a dessert also. Ah, and the funny thing is that their traditional sweets are not actually sweet. Weird.
Ovi
