Malaysians hit back after minister says nation ‘addicted’ to dining out, making people poorer

Economy Minister Rafizi Ramli has urged Malaysians to cook at home more, after blaming dining-out culture for citizens feeling the pinch

Critics say he has overlooked the cost of domestic labour and that Malaysia’s street food culture provides quick and cheap meals for workers

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People dine in Penang. Malaysia’s world-famous street food culture partly stems from providing quick, cheap meals for workers to eat on the go. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 9:30am, 27 Sep 2023

Time-harried Malaysians have hit back at a minister’s suggestion that the country is “addicted” to dining out and chewing up its own money, defending a 24-hour outdoor food culture spawned to cater for factory workers and arguing for more free public spaces to socialise.

The furore was sparked by Economy Minister Rafizi Ramli, who said on September 17 that his compatriots’ habit of regularly dining out was the reason they were feeling the pinch, urging them to cook at home to save money.

“We can see that the income used for eating out, whether it’s takeaway or eating at a restaurant or stall … has grown over the years. This is not about me making up stories, but this is based on the data,” he was reported as saying by local newspaper Sinar Harian.

Food vendors in Kuala Lumpur. Many see shared meals out as the bedrock of Malaysia’s diet and culture. Photo: Bloomberg

His comments, backed by government data on household expenditure surveys, have sparked a backlash from a country that’s proud of its food and where shared meals out form the bedrock of diet and culture.

“Time is a trade-off between the full costs of eating in and eating out,” Christopher Choong, deputy director of research at Malaysia’s Khazanah Research Institute said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

He pointed out that the minister had overlooked the cost of domestic labour and household production in his calculus that a nation eating at home saves money. “You need time for planning, groceries, cleaning, plus mental labour to do so, and opportunity costs of unpaid hours,” he said.

In a study on the topic of eating out in 2020, Choong and fellow researcher Goh Ming Jun said “time poverty” affected 61.5 per cent of Malaysian women and 48 per cent of men, especially in low-income households in the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan area.