5,000 grams

Technorati tags: Humor, Economy, Price Control, Coomunist Economy, Cooking Oil, Malaysia

5kg of cooking oil... that's all you get to buy at a time. If you ask Walski, announcing this is probably the best way to ensure hoarding and panic buying. Especially since you've got the weekend to do it. Or if a family of 5, each with a 5 kg bottle of cooking oil, stands at the cashier, each purchasing their own oil... is the supermarket gonna do DNA tests to ensure the 5 aren't related?

Are we also gonna start seeing Cooking Oil Police? Whose acronym, quite by coincidence, also happens to be COP...

This is the kind of potential idiocy you end up getting when government continually screws around with free-market supply & demand (there are better ways of doing it, incidentally). __earthinc likens the move (and similar ones in the past) to increasing "communistic" price-control tactics. Lulu, however, thinks donuts are to be blamed. A donut-driven economy, Lulu?

Don't know about you, but Walski's probably gonna lay off the yau char kwai (or any other hawker deep-frieds) for a while...
(more 5kg oily thoughts, in the full post)

Why?

Recycling. A big vat of oil, to deep fry yau char kwai with, is probably about 5kg. Recycling it for eternity will allow you to sell lots of deep fried goodies. And it's a known fact that recycled cooking oil can be carcinogenic (that's cancer-causing, to you semi-literates). Walski has long suspected that one of the leading causes, why incidences of cancer has been on the increase in the last decade, is deep-fried hawker food - yau char kwai being one of them. One that Walski happens to like a lot, dammit.

And what is one of the things that hawkers would probably do help increase their bottom line? Recycle the oil as much as possible, especially for deep-fried foods. One 5kg bottle of cooking oil? Probably good for a month's worth of crispy brown yau char kwai ... or deep-fried banana fritters (another one of Walski's favourites, dammit).

Okay, Walski hopes not. Seriously. Alternatively, Walski should really consider learning to make them things.

All kidding aside - is controlling how much a person buys effective? Or even enforceable, in the first place? Sounds like our government has totally run out of ideas to sustain this economy, sometimes.

Incidentally, if you start seeing water-cannons poised up and down the supermarket cooking oil aisle, you'll know why. Now, that would be an interesting sight... FRU guarding the cooking oil aisle... How's the MSM gonna spin such incidents is also going to be interesting...

Well, for now, let's see how effective this latest move is to restore order to the cooking oil supply-and-demand equillibrium. Walski will reserve his judgement for now.

And in the meantime, go easy on those deep-fried hawker foods, too.