I’m in the restaurant business and from experience I know that Taiwanese eat few different vegetables. Look at the lunchboxes. A lot of grease rice and few veggies.
In my place I tried to put a lot of different vegetables on the plates and they mostly return them and only eat the meats. Lucky for me they like my vegetable soups, hey … 1-0 for me. And… look at the salad buffets, most Taiwanese eat dressing with salad instead of salad with dressing.
I know that in the past farmers had to eat fats, (porkfat) because they needed the calories and nothing else was available and fats kept for a long time. But nowadays office workers don’t need this kind of food. They need a healthy balanced diet, but nooo…they prefer grease fried foodstall chicken etc… Even the children are in the habit. look at all the stands after schools out, full of youths, go at night on the street, foodstalls are very busy. They snack all day, the wrong food. And recently they are getting fatter, especially older women and men.
Actually, pork and other meat and fish is mostly bought fresh everyday on the market and anyway meat needs to mature for a while (without flies actually and in the fridge preferably), only offal needs to be consumed pretty quick as this will deteriorate fast.
Another thing they are doing is putting sigar in most of the things they eat. And than they are complany that western candy and chocolat are toooo sweet, come on who are they kidding. Taiwan consumes a lot of sugar, although in a stealthy way.
I always have to laugh when I think back at the time people in my home country used to say (when the first chinese restaurants appeared) that chinese food is soooo healthy, yeah…right!
The years I spent in Taiwan I really opened my eyes when looking at food, I will eat most things here but I’m very carefull when it comes to clams, they can give you the runner. But in doing so I try to pick the best for my health, I doesn’t work all the time and sometimes no other choice so I’ve to eat it. Outside of Taipei there are not to many Subways. BTW, their bread is crap but until now there’s no other choice, but it’ll change soon.
Verdict: in Taiwan they don’t handle food (even my wife and other employees I have to correct sometimes they are handling food) as it has to be and they still eat stuff they don’t have to. so, be carefull what you eat wher you are at that very moment. I’ve eaten the most strange things and haven’t been sick toooo many times yet.
One more thing, if you decide to eat deepfried stuff, look at the oil first because a lot of vendors don’t chance it tooo often. It won’t make you sick immediately but it’s cancerogenous. They mostly use soya oil.