If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Yes, Tuoi Tre can confirm this after its reporter discovered, while disguising himself as a waiter, that roadside eateries in a college neighborhood in Ho Chi Minh City’s outlying Thu Duc District used dirty and putrid ingredients.

For sure, they offer meals to local students at a price twice as cheap as city central areas.

A dish of rice costs a mere VND12,000 (58 U.S. cents) to VND15,000 (72 U.S. cents) in the neighborhood, where some 35,000 students are studying for their first degree at top-tier universities, while one would have to pay VND25,000 ($1.2) to VND30,000 ($1.4) for it in inner city areas. And here is the reason for this bargain.

Your correspondent was recruited as a waiter at MV, an eatery there, last month and felt shocked at the way they prepared the affordable meals.

The kitchen was stuffed with pots, saucepans, meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables that were all left near a big can full of smelly food remains on a fatty floor, just a step away from the dishwashing area and bathroom.

Huong, the owner of MV, was now taking frozen meat and fish from a fridge and then poured them all into a pan already black after repeated use.

She also fried chicken wings and thighs in the same black-oil pan to be used again the following days to cook all kinds of stuff like pork, fish, squids, frogs, eggs, water spinach, bamboo shoots, and other vegetables. Next, the woman showed her skills to turn rotten pork into freshly looking dishes, the main course of any student’s meal.

The eatery owner pulled a plastic bag of fetid pork out of the same fridge and threw the contents into a water pan, before getting them into a plastic basin in a dust-covered corner.

Then she dumped a package of yellow sugar, another of red substance with an ‘Indian curry’ label on the outside, some white powder, and home-made fish sauce into a steel pot before cramming the rotted meat inside.

She blended them together and stirred the mixture for a few seconds. And the meat now looked really clean, and eye-catching.

Other ingredients like fruit and vegetables were cursorily washed or not at all before they were cooked.

Your correspondent also worked as a waiter at another eatery, SV, a stone’s throw from MV, which followed nearly the same food preparation process.

Foodstuffs were put close to the bathroom and the drainage system in a tiny kitchen.

They were prepared with bare hands whereas cooks were often seen stuffing pork into tofu cubes with the same naked fingers they used to peel fruit and tubers a moment earlier.

The owner, Quy, said that all this could be bought at dirt cheap prices at a district market because they were either decaying or could not be sold during previous market sessions.