Abacus | Is Hong Kong being served fairly? Food prices in UK, Singapore and Japan suggest not

Neil Newman fills his shopping basket in markets around the world and finds the comparisons with Hong Kong hard to swallow

In Britain, the bill gets cut by 60 per cent; in Singapore, by 25 per cent. Oh, and don’t even get him started on the shape of Japanese vegetables

Reading Time:6 minutes

Hong Kong’s expensive. Who moo? Photo: Neil Newman

Published: 9:00am, 27 Jul 2020Updated: 9:00am, 27 Jul 2020

A BRIEF HISTORY OF HONG KONG COWS

Long gone are the days of dairy cattle grazing peacefully in the clover meadows of Hong Kong Island, or in the rolling hills of Lantau. Our local milk moo cows are now in Guangdong, according to Kowloon Dairy and Trappist Dairy.

The last remnant of the Lantau Trappist Dairy herd was released into the wild in the early 1980s as the monks sold their business to Yuen Long’s Lark Group. They now happily graze the Fusion supermarket’s fruit displays in Mui Wo, upsetting their little tummies – all four of them – and leaving the residents of Silvermine Bay to wade through days of bovine slurry after their feast.

MILK WAS AN EXPAT THING

Dairy was traditionally not a part of Asian diets, so when the British came to Hong Kong in the mid-19th century, it was common for a foreign family to have at least one cow. That was until Dairy Farm was set up in rural Pok Fu Lam by a Scotsman named Patrick Manson in 1886. The milk from 80 cows was transported to an ice house on the corner of Wyndham Street and Lower Albert Road – now the Foreign Correspondents’ Club – and then on to customers in Central. The farm wound up its operations in the 1980s at about the time the Trappist monks packed it in.

Aside from dairy, many other foods in the Western diet have become commonplace in Asia, particularly with the introduction of fast food, as has Asian food in the Western diet, blurring the standard definitions of the two. Supermarkets in Asia now stock many similar, or even identical, items as supermarkets in Europe or Britain. Much of it is imported. And Western ingredients have inspired new local delicacies. For example, as I dig into bubbling Double Gloucester cheese on toast with tomato on top for elevenses, a young Hongkonger may tuck into peanut butter on toast with condensed milk on top.

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x