What do people in Singapore eat in a day?
Singapore eats out, mostly at hawker centres. The day starts with kaya toast and kopi, lunch is a plate of chicken rice at about 640 kcal, and dinner is more noodles, rice or satay from the next stall.
Typical dishes and their calories
Breakfast
The classic breakfast is kaya toast: charcoal grilled bread with kaya, a jam of egg, coconut milk and sugar, and a thick slab of cold butter. It comes with two soft boiled eggs and a cup of kopi or tea. That butter alone adds about 180 kcal. Others start the day with roti prata, a flaky fried flatbread dipped in curry, or nasi lemak, rice cooked in coconut milk.
Lunch
Lunch is bought, not packed. Office workers walk to the nearest hawker centre or food court, pick a stall and share a table with strangers. Hainanese chicken rice is the national favourite: poached chicken on rice cooked in chicken stock, with chilli and ginger. A plate is about 640 kcal, even with the skin taken off.
Dinner
Dinner is often the hawker centre again, now with family. Laksa, noodles in a spicy coconut and lemongrass soup, char kway teow, flat rice noodles fried with prawns and lard, and Hokkien mee, about 520 kcal a plate, are all regular picks. For a night out, it is chilli crab or black pepper crab, eaten with your hands.
Starters
Meals here do not really have starters. Dishes come at once and get shared. The closest thing is satay, grilled skewers of chicken, beef or mutton with peanut sauce, about 400 kcal for five sticks. Otah, a spiced fishcake grilled in a banana leaf, and Indian rojak, fritters with a sweet and spicy gravy, also go round the table.
Desserts
Dessert is cold, because it is hot outside. Ice kachang is a mound of shaved ice with red beans, sweet corn, jelly and bright syrups. Chendol is green pandan jelly in coconut milk with palm sugar. Both come from the same hawker centre as dinner.
Drinks
Kopi is coffee the local way, roasted dark and strained through a cloth bag. Order it with words: kopi comes with condensed milk, about 140 kcal a cup, kopi O is black with sugar, kopi C has evaporated milk and kopi peng is iced. Teh tarik is tea pulled between two jugs until it foams, about 230 kcal. Milo, the malt drink, is a favourite too, and a Milo Dinosaur with extra powder on top is about 360 kcal.
Street food
Street food in Singapore moved indoors decades ago, into hawker centres with dozens of small stalls under one roof. Each stall usually does one dish and has done it for years. In 2020 UNESCO put hawker culture on its list of intangible cultural heritage. Fried carrot cake, which is radish cake fried with egg, is a typical stall, about 560 kcal for the black one with sweet soy sauce.
Normal there, odd elsewhere
You reserve a table at a hawker centre by leaving a packet of tissues on it. Durian, the spiky fruit, is banned on public transport and in many buildings because of its smell. The word kopitiam is two languages at once: kopi is Malay for coffee and tiam is Hokkien for shop. And carrot cake has no carrot in it.