A Very Brilliant and Very Malaysian Way to Lose Weight & Save Money

I have always wondered why government agencies always find it necessary to serve food at every meeting.

I know, I know. It’s the Malaysian way, we say. We must be courteous to our guests. But seriously, do we really need to lavish colleagues with so much food. In the private sector, cold and warm water is as good as it gets.

Food is served and guests are obligated to eat. If they don’t take a bite, they feel it’s rude. So in Malaysia, more often than not, you go to five meetings with government related agencies, you end up eating five times. Each time coconut, sugar and cholesterol-laden “kuih muih”. And don’t forget the coffee and tea laced to the brim with sweetened condense milk (and we wonder why we are short of sugar supply and have too many fat people in Malaysia)

It’s a business meeting. You just want to get productive, address the issues and get back to work. No, no, you put the food on the table, you have to allocate an extra 15 minutes non-productive time for small talk and for the guests to swallow their food.

Now, let’s just play with some numbers. The food and drinks is estimated at RM3 per pax. Assuming that 5% of our entire 1.1 million civil servants workforce have to attend just two meetings a month. That’s a whopping RM3.96 million in food cost!

RM3.96 million of taxpayers’ money on food to feed “kuih muih” to civil servants (who are already paid salary and bonuses to serve the rakyat). And later, probably another RM500K on a campaign to help our obese civil work force shed the extra pounds.

So if we cut the food:
We save RM3.96 million or more.
Cut the 15 minutes required to swallow the food, we will get an extra 3 hours of productive for the staff attending the meeting (at 5% of the 1.1million work force, that’s 165K additional hours).
We save on the 500K to run a weight loss campaign.

OK, maybe my numbers are flawed, but hey, I hope someone gets the picture.