Where food and art collide

The host of long-running show Yan Can Cook drinks soup every day

- Tan Hsueh Yun

When TV chef Martin Yan sits down to a meal at home, he starts with soup. Slow-simmered clear soup, the energetic 76-year-old believes, is the key to staying healthy.

The Guangzhou-born chef, who has hosted Yan Can Cook on American public television since 1982, was in town recently to speak to healthcare professionals.

At a talk on May 20 by the National Healthcare Group and Ng Teng Fong Centre for Healthcare Innovation - which looks at ways to improve productivity in the healthcare system here - he spoke about using food as medicine.

The chef, who was last in Singapore about seven years ago, also fielded questions such as how to make hospital food palatable to elderly patients and how to get them to eat healthily after they are discharged.

Chef Yan, who has a master's degree in food science and nutrition from the University of California, Davis, also did a brief cooking demonstration of Sea Coconut Chicken Ginseng Soup, using ingredients such as American ginseng, Chinese almonds and goji berries.

He tells The Sunday Times: "You have a good, healthy tonic, which is infused with a lot of good stuff from ingredients like goji berries and ginseng. A lot of these ingredients are high in antioxidants. When you drink it, it's very nourishing, but you are not stuffed.

"When you drink soup at the start of dinner, you eat less. You go to Japanese restaurants and they give you miso soup. There are three to four pieces of tofu and a tiny bit of seaweed. But when you finish that, you don't eat as much.