Teh Tarik

A colleague asked whether Malaysian drink ‘British tea’, other than drinking teh tarik. I asked what it meant by ‘British’ tea and he explained that it’s plain tea, to which I say we do. It’s teh ‘O’, as in the ‘O’ alluding to the tea is plain without sugar and condensed milk. But of course Malaysian definition of normal tea is the full set, i.e. with sugar, condensed milk and ice. Hence why we Malaysian are so obese.

We then traveled down the conversation path of how unhealthy food is nowadays with Ultra Processed Food (UPF) being our main intakes and how our children are consuming UPFs left and right. I added it’s a bit hard to avoid nowadays since it is relatively cheaper than non-processed food, very easy to consume and tastes good too. The last two points are in the olden days conflicting, since desserts like cakes for example need a copious amount of work (you have to churn the butter, whip the cream, mill the flour etc.) and resources (cream needs to be separated from milk, eggs are not as abundant and sugar is extracted from huge amounts of raw products), which make eating a decadent food, more easily justifiable. Nowadays, this balance is gone.

We then shook our heads and lamented at our world that we live in. Then we ate some biscuits before going back to our desks.

Thank you for reading.