Inconvenient truth of city living

Inconvenient truth of city living

While many city dwellers admire rural life, an increasing number of the population from other provinces move to Bangkok every year. A rapid expansion of condominium projects, congested roads, paddy fields in suburbs and the outskirts of Bangkok being transformed into residential zones are some of the indicators showing more people have relocated and settled in Bangkok.

At the end of 2014 Bangkok had an estimated population of 8.5 million, and more than 14 million people lived in peripheral provinces. For a long time, this populous city has been regarded as the centre of everything in Thailand —the economy, education, business, mass transportation, shopping, etc.

My friend who lives in an affluent village in the Kaset-Nawamin area told me that her neighbour, who is in her late 40s, sold land in Ang Thong for 30 million baht and moved to live with her daughter in Bangkok. I could not imagine how large the land in a provincial area must be to be worth that much, but just felt sorry that she exchanged her land for the money and her life in the city. She might find urban life more preferable, who knows?

For some people Bangkok is, in a sense, convenient. One example is shopping for food. In most supermarkets, a wide variety of food products grown in rural areas are available for consumers. I usually buy vegetables and fresh food from the supermarket near my house, with special preference for goods with "pesticide-free" labels.

Many times, chemical-free products that I bought have been left in the fridge for too long and therefore require binning, as the expiry date is mentioned clearly on the package. Recently, while cleaning the fridge, I found a small plastic bag with three tomatoes in it. The plastic bag, not yet opened, was of course labelled "chemical-free".

The tomatoes were bought three weeks ago and were meant to be used to make spaghetti sauce. Yet they still looked as fresh as the day I bought them. At first, I was thinking of keeping them a little longer in the fridge to see when they would actually start to wither. In the end, I decided to throw them away.

I recall many times throwing away fresh food and vegetables when the expiry date came, even though the products did not look to have gone off.

As a consumer, I'm willing to pay a bit more for a better quality product, and of course a bag of tomatoes with the "pesticide-free" label is more expensive than one without such a tag. But after seeing the tomatoes lasting much longer than they were supposed to, I am now really not sure if they were chemical-free. This has made me hesitate to buy goods stamped with the pesticide-free label.

During the recent New Year holiday, as usual, we paid a visit to our family in the suburbs, allowing the kids to be with their granny and aunties and play among nature, something that is hard to do in Bangkok. On the last day of the long holiday, we took back a big basket of tasty food — fresh vegetables and rice — produced by our aunt. The amount of food seemed like it could save us dinner expenses for a week. A few days later, the veggies had withered a bit. I did not throw them away and ate them all without hesitation.

It's true that urban living is more convenient as long as resources have been organised properly in city areas. But when it comes to quality of life — food consumption, for example — that's a different story.

I once trusted the food in supermarkets that comes with a safety certification mark, but now I do not. Somehow, food in traditional fresh markets seems a better alternative.   

One of my friends planned to settle down in Chiang Mai a few years ago. There, he said he spent a very small amount of money on food for his whole family and the kids were happy with the natural environment. They could walk to school, avoiding traffic congestion found during rush hour in the capital city. Back then, his friends (including me), were jealous of his life. However, I recently heard that he has moved his family back to Bangkok.

I don't know why.

We all know what is best for ourselves. So choose your life, live your choice.


Sasiwimon Boonruang is a writer for the Bangkok Post's Life section.

Sasiwimon Boonruang

Writer for the Life section

Sasiwimon Boonruang is a writer for the Life section of the Bangkok Post.

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