Thought for Food

Sorry about the title, it's been a punny day.

-crickets-

This is a blog that I've sort of avoided writing, because I have a lot of opinions about Indonesian food, and a lot of them are probably quite negative. Furthermore, I should be spending a little more time right now writing my paper, but I'm still ruminating over it. In any case, I do feel that in all my observations about Indonesia, I really should say something about its cuisine. Food is after all a big part of any culture.

So. Food. Makanan. Indonesia. There is a saying in Indonesia that goes along the lines of belum makan nasi, belum makan. What this embodies is a belief in Indonesian culture that if you haven't eaten rice, then you haven't actually eaten. If food is the keystone to culture, then rice is the keystone to Indonesian food. Many Indonesians feel that anything eaten that is not with rice is merely a snack, a light meal, and that rice is the real sustenance. For example, eating a McDonalds hamburger would be considered a snack. In fact, this cultural perception about the essential nature of rice in meals has been capitalised upon in fast food marketing so that, should you go to a McDonalds or a KFC here in Indonesia, you can order rice with your meal.

Rice also has another impact on Indonesian food: its homogeneity. Now, some people might think that this is a bit unfair of me, or a bit narrow-minded of me, but in all my travels I must say that Indonesia as a nation has one of the most unvaried cuisines I've ever experienced. Any Indonesian dish that you order here will almost certainly consist of either rice or noodles, with chicken, beef, or egg. Furthermore, the same types of dishes are usually eaten for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Flavours tend to be limited to the really obvious such as salty, sweet or spicy, or a mixture of the three. While people will proudly invite you to taste regional specialities, usually the only variation is a slight alteration of the aforementioned three flavours, and possibly coupled with a single different ingredient. In Yogyakarta, for example, the famous foods were gorengan (deep fried anything) and sweet foods. However, these can be found all over Java. In Malang, the famous food is the apple, but cooking here rarely incorporates it. Ingredients tend to be very basic, using a lot of oil, and not big portions of meat of vegetables. Fresh vegetables are always a little suspect here, because there's no guarantee what sort of fertilisers or insecticides are being used. While Indonesian food tends to taste OK, the flavours are blatant, there's little variety between dishes, and meals are not what one would consider healthy. In fact, a Indonesian friend of mine was telling me once how a white guy cooked her spaghetti bolognese once, and when I asked her if she liked it, she said it didn't taste like anything. The Indonesian palate, bombarded as it is by extreme flavours its whole life, does not often appreciate the finer distinctions of flavour. Interestingly, there are not many Indonesian words to describe flavour. Merasa actually means to feel, as well as to taste, and the words used to describe flavours are as blatant as the flavours themselves. Part of this food homogeneity I think is to do with Indonesian culture at its most basic - we've always done it like this, why bother changing now? If you want to hear a gorilla story which is a very good allegory for this, ask me and I'll tell it to you with joy. Anyway, suffice to say, Indonesians as a rule don't seek out to try new things, and this is reflected in their food. Variety is the spice of life as an ethos has been replaced with chilli is the spice of life. Therefore, to many outsiders, Indonesian food can become very boring very quickly, and I've had a few friends express surprise that Indonesian food isn't as developed as other South-East Asian cuisines.

Now, I've talked about food hygiene here and a bit about treatment of animals for meat here, so I won't go on about that. What I will talk about though is the food industry here. In Indonesia, food is incredibly cheap. Not just relative to international prices, but relative to the cost of other things here as well. In Indonesia, you see extreme poverty, and even the middle classes here appear poor relative to developed nations. I think I mentioned before that it is very rare to have hot water in a home here. However, despite all this, you never see people starving. Even the poorest of people begging on street corners look well fed, and this is because of the ease with which you can buy a meal for only 50c Australian. The downside to the affordability of food is the perpetuation of a serf like system whereby a huge number of people work in rice fields for a pittance with only the most rudimentary of tools. Another downside to this is that because rice is grown in small, individual paddies, and dried on mats on the side of the road, rather than grown and prepared industrially, there is no form of quality control. In fact, a symptom of rice being dried on bitumen is a certain prevalence of gravel in cooked rice. I seem to constantly encounter rocks in my rice, and this coupled with all the sugary foods here and my recurring nightmare that all my teeth fall out, has instilled in me a deep fear of going to the dentist when I get home.

The absolute affordability of Indonesian food in restaurants means that cooking is actually quite unusual. When I say to people I miss cooking like I do in Australia, they immediately express surprise that I can cook at all, and view it as quite an achievement. In supermarkets, fresh ingredients are rather minimal, with an enormous assortment of pre-packaged, processed food items. For those of you who are unaware, a large component of Indonesian food is the flavour enhancer MSG, which a number of people seem to have allergic reactions to. Anyway, this ingredient is added to absolutely everything in this country, but nonetheless, I was still surprised at the supermarket last night. Most of you I presume will be familiar with those "instant" pasta meals you can buy, where you add water, and sometimes milk and butter, to the packeted ingredients and in less than ten minutes you have pasta. Anyway, they were selling those at a supermarket full of imported items I went to last night, and each packet had "MSG Free" written on the front. Except, however, you could only just see this declaration because someone had put a white sticker over this writing to cover it up. After asking a few (as per usual, singularly unhelpful) staff members about this, I surmised that it had been covered up because the lack of MSG in food would be a deterrent to Indonesian customers. So, back to the cooking issue, most kos are ill-equipped with kitchen things, and rarely have a stove, oven, or refrigerator. I don't cook here, because the effort I would have to go to find ingredients and equipment would be enormous. In fact, I don't think I was even allowed to use the kitchen in my last kos - not that I ever did except to boil water. One of the things I've been fantasising about the most in my last couple of weeks here is being able to cook when I get home, and the abundance and variety of fresh foods back home. Being able to cook everything from Italian to a roast to chops to salads to tempura.

So, the last thing I'll say about Indonesian food is its reluctance to really accept foreign influences. Finding decent international food in Indonesia in either restaurants or supermarkets is quite difficult (except, perhaps, in Bali), and relatively very expensive. One of the reasons for this is because "Western" food in Indonesia is highly Indonesianised. Deep fried. Eaten with chilli sauce. Inappropriately sweet. For example, "cheese" here is eaten mixed with chocolate, pastries and fruit. This reluctance is really its downfall. Some of the best cuisines in the world have been made so because of innovation and inventiveness. Italy, for example, got rice and noodles from Asia. In Malaysia, you can find amazing food combining Chinese, Indian and native Malaysian styles and ingredients. Other nations such as Japan and France have made eating into an art form, pushing creative boundaries and always seeking to improve on old recipes.

A lot of Indonesian food has potential; sate (meat, with peanut sauce, on sticks, served with rice), rawon (salty beef soup, served with rice), rendang (coconut cream beef curry, served with - you guessed it - rice). But often poor quality meat, overwhelming single flavours, and unhealthy preparation prevent these dishes from reaching that potential. Perhaps when I get home, and regain my appetite after I've had some time to enjoy some other cuisines for a while, I'll try to work with these recipes and see what I can come up with.

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The Big Hand Points To...

...jam karet. A well-known phrase that people learning Indonesian love to throw around. Literally translated it means "rubber time", but is understood as time is flexible. In Indonesia, I don't think jam karet quite covers the issue of time. Time isn't just flexible in this country, but seems to follow its own rules entirely. It's as though this place exists in some vortex, some anomaly where while time still follows a linear path, it doesn't do so at a constant rate. Let's follow up this pseudo-physics claim with some examples, shall we?

Clocks

If you happen to see a wall clock in Indonesia, you can be almost completely certain that it does not show the right time. If it does show the right time, it's probably because the clock has actually stopped, and you managed to catch it at one of the two times in a day where a stopped clock shows the correct time for one second. Nobody ever seems bothered by this. Big clocks in public places and on monuments show the wrong time. Wall clocks in government departments show the wrong time. Clocks at university show the wrong time. In fact, the only clock I can remember seeing showing the correct time (more or less) is the clock at my gym, and I suspect that is simply so they can throw the patrons out at exactly 11:30 so all the staff can have lunch and a nap. Ironically, since I've been here, the clock on my mobile phone has stopped keeping time properly, particularly if it goes flat. I suspect there's some kind of aberrant electro-magnetic field that affects the functionality of clocks here. Or possibly it's simply a cultural disinterest in accurate time. Whatever you would like to believe.

Waiting

Living in Indonesia, it is not unreasonable to set aside a whole day for a single task. My general rule of thumb, one which I often forget and therefore end up frustrated about, is that when attempting to do something, multiply the time you would normally expect it to take by three. When trying to do something here, you have to allow for time-affecting factors such as traffic, paperwork, "queueing" (something that demands a blog entry of its own), the general incompetence and unhelpfulness of the people in whatever office or shop you're trying to do your task in (usually counteracted frustratingly with utmost friendliness and politeness) and of course the incredible likelihood that wherever you want to go is tutup (closed) or whatever you want is kosong (out of stock). If you are trying to walk somewhere, you'll inevitably be stuck behind an Indonesian who is walking incredibly slowly whilst taking up the entire pathway. If you are trying to do some activity with someone or more than one person other than your self, you also have to factor in a very significant portion of time which will be spent waiting around in some random place for somebody or a decision to be made with no good reason whatsoever. You will find that you will spend most of your time waiting.

Language

Indonesia's vague and relaxed attitude from time can also be discerned from the multitude of vague and relaxed phrases relating to time (this also applies to any kind of empirical measurement). Words such as besok, which can mean tomorrow or any unspecified day afterwards, and kemarin, which means yesterday and beyond. Nanti for later. Kira-kira or kurang-lebih for approximately. Mungkin for maybe. Invariably, if you ask someone how long something will take, you'll usually get an answer along the lines of sebentar (a moment) or not too long, or it'll be done later sometime, or tomorrow. If you are actually given some kind of time frame, be sure to mentally multiply it by three like I mentioned earlier. In Java particularly, people will not want to upset you by having to tell you it is going to be longer than you'd like so will cheerfully deliberately underestimate things, and generally estimating time isn't their forte anyway.

People who know me well know that I'm not exactly the timeliest of people. Many of my friends have started making coffee dates at a particular time, and then arriving half an hour later which is when they figure I'll be arriving. They're usually correct. I'm also quite vague at times. So it will be interesting to see how this year has impacted on my ability to turn up on time. Either I'll have learned my lesson and will make an effort to be more punctual in future, or I'll have absorbed Indonesia's culture of time and will be worse than ever. Only time will tell.

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Health and Hygiene: A Cultural Interpretation

After subjecting my friend to a mini-rant/lecture on this topic, I figured I'd spare her and unleash instead on my blog about my observations on health and hygiene in Indonesia. One of the first things a Westerner will notice about Indonesia on arrival is the stark difference in what is considered healthy and hygienic here as compared to back home. These differences cross a very broad range of areas, so let's break them down into subsections. I love subsections, and using underline and bold. I've been in uni FAR too long. Anyway, let's begin with:

The Streets

After years of brainwashing in primary school combined with a genuine concern with the environment, I was and still am appalled at the way people simply drop rubbish on the ground here. Everywhere. People habitually drop plastic packaging on the ground the second they're done with it, and almost everywhere you go, you see rubbish. I'm often upset by this, because the natural beauty of this country is almost always marred by the ever present carelessly discarded trash. Even when I hiked for hours through mud to get to a very isolated lake in the middle of an island, there was STILL rubbish everywhere. And although it may make it look cleaner, the heavy rains are constantly washing rubbish away from the streets and into rivers and oceans.

Back home, a combination of playschool, government-sponsored anti-littering campaigns and hefty littering fines have all served to severely discourage littering. Rubbish bins are in abundance. Littering, generally, is minimal. People make a moderate effort to recycle. Generally, it looks cleaner back in Australia (though, we have 1/10 of the people, and a lot more space), and it's socially bad form to litter.

However, one other thing must be mentioned. In Indonesia, people from the lower classes DO go along the streets and popular rubbish dumping spots, collecting and sorting rubbish for a pittance. While arguably yes, this creates jobs (extremely low-paying however) and helps keep the streets clean, it does very little to act as a deterrence to littering, or as encouragement to keep your environment clean and beautiful.

The Kitchen

As many people who have visited here, and have experienced food-related sickness first-hand, can testify, Indonesia is not a shining example of food handling and kitchen cleanliness. There are several reasons for this.

First of all, good refrigeration is rare. Many meats and vegetables are left at room temperature until they are used, and lots of styles of food, for example Padang cooking, involve meals being cooked in the morning, and servings dolled out during the day until the dish is finished. This can mean that the gorengan (fried food) you just ate has been sitting there for 12 hours or more. For those of the more sensitive stomachs, the quick growth of bacteria in the warm, humid weather can be devastating.

Secondly, dishes here tend to be washed in cold, tap water. After discussing this with a few Indonesians, there seems to be a national presumption that water = clean. If you wash something with water, and it looks clean, it automatically is clean. What many of these people forget though, is that in fact their tap water is not clean. It is not clean enough to drink. So the germs that they avoid when they avoid drinking tap water, they ingest anyway because their plates and cutlery are covered in them once washed. A typical Indonesian sink will have a small bowl filled with detergent and water, and a sponge sitting soggily in it. This water and this sponge will rarely be changed, warms up during the hot days, and probably provides an ideal home for all sorts of bacterial colonies. This sponge is then applied to dish after dish, washed under running cold water (or in a bucket if it's a

little street stall) never washed, and replaced back into its detergenty little swamp. Hot water is very rare in this country, and people don't seem to know that boiling water kills germs. Most accept what they see on TV, detergent makes things clean, and don't realise that while detergent emulsifies and removes grease, it is not antibacterial, and doesn't kill germs. Looking clean is as good as being clean most of the time.

The Bathroom

One of the biggest surprises I've had since living in Indonesia is finding out that Indonesians believe that white people are dirty. One of the main reasons for this is that many feel we do not bathe enough. When presented with this statement, from time to time I retort with "I don't need to bathe as much, because I get it right the first time". Living here probably hasn't been great for my cultural sensitivity. Anyway, in this previous post I described the process of mandi as it is done in Indonesia. In short, ladling cold water on yourself to wash yourself. Now for me, I must admit, I have never really felt completely clean after a mandi. Back home, I have long scalding showers, and always feel completely cleansed afterwards. Whereas back home, it would be almost unthinkable to have a house without hot water, here it is very rare to find a house with hot water. My friend told me the other day, he always thought that white people had hot showers simply because we are spoiled. There's something, however, about cold water for me which simply doesn't feel like it cleans me as much, and something about ladling water onto you which feels like you're never compl

etely doused and washed. Also, inevitably, after a mandi, the floor is covered in water, and it is typical to wear shoes into the bathroom while bathing. I think an important part of being clean for me is also being dry, and in Indonesia, you are almost never dry. Anyway, I usually have at least one mandi a day, adding more depending on how hot it has been or how much physical activity I've had. Apparently though, I'm still a dirty Bule.

The Toilet

This issue was also the source of an argument between my friend and I the other day. The vast majority of Indonesian toilets are squat toilets. This, or at least how I understand it, is how Indonesians use them. First they squat over the toilet and complete their business, next they use either a hose or a gayung (small ladel) to wet their left ha

nd (and underneath themselves) and physically wash themselves with direct contact between their hands and their bottoms. This is usually quite a messy business, and water will inevitably get all over the floor of the bathroom. They then wash their hands (hopefully usually with soap) and go along their merry way.

Again, I was shocked to hear in light of all this that Indonesians think white people are dirty because we use toilet paper. The reasoning behind that presumption is this: using toilet paper does not adequately clean your behind. This again drawing back to the belief that water cleans everything. I responded with the assertion that using toilet paper means we don't have to touch anything at all, and our hands are protected from both being dirty and being covered in germs. Indonesians try avoid any potential contamination by re

serving their left hand for toilet associated activities, and their right hand for picking up things, taking things from people, and so forth. It wasn't really until this conversation that I understood the impact culture can have on ideas of cleanliness.

First Aid and Health

Indonesia is still very much a belief-based culture. I've had several experiences with Indonesian "first-aid", but my most memorable ones so far are probably the two times I burnt my leg on the muffler of a motorbike. The first time, my friend insisted I put toothpaste on the burn. "When in Rome," I thought, and gave it a go. One day and a pretty filthy, oozing infection in my leg later, I boiled water and thoroughly washed the thing in dettol. I was sitting on the kitchen floor busily attending my festering leg, when my Ibu Kos (owner of my a

ccommodation) walked in and asked what I was doing. After explaining I'd burnt my leg and had an infection, she paused before informing me I should have used toothpaste. Facepalm.

The second time I had burnt my leg on the trip to Batu, a mountain range near Malang. When we arrived, I went to try to find some ice, however, all the Indonesians (including the warung owner I was trying to buy it from) in the vicinity started protesting my clearly unlearned ways and offering loudly several other treatments including the tried and tested toothpaste, and my personal favourite, butter. This is one of the few times I've really lost my cool here, and I ended up screaming at everyone to shut up, none of them knew what they were talking about, there was no way in hell I was putting filthy butter on my leg, and to give me ice immediately. Which was probably not very sensitive of me, but Indonesians, wh

o almost always mean well and try to help, are very insistent in that sense of helpfulness, and will often help you even if you don't want or need their idea of help. And like I said, there was no way in hell I was putting butter on a burn.

Before I finish, I'll make a couple of other observations about Indoesian health. Like I said above, health here is still riddled with hearsay and superstition. One traditional remedy, which I don't believe in, but have tried a couple of times anyway, is called kerokan. This remedy is a "cure" to an affliction called masuk angin (roughly translated to mean that a bad wind is inside your body). Masuk angin is pretty much used to describe any type of malaise, but particularly things such as colds. Kerokan involves rubbing the skin of the back in tiger balm (or the like) and then running the edge of a coin along in curved lines. The idea is to

let the wind out by increasing blood flow. Now, I don't think that this really will cure anything, and it looks frankly horrific afterwards, but it does feel like a nice massage.

Here's a picture:

Finally, I'll briefly mention Indonesian hospitals. To be honest, I was seriously impressed by them. When I went to go get my x-ray after my adventures here, in just two hours for for AU$20, I managed to get a consultation, an x-ray, the results of my x-ray, a follow up consultation with a prescription and the prescription filled. I never actually followed that blog up with the humorous story of actually getting the x-ray. Suffice to say, I think I gave the little radiologist girl the embarrassment as well as the story of her life when she had to ask me to take out my nipple piercing, and then had to mime what she meant after I misunderstood and started taking out my earrings. When I couldn't, so was provided instead with a lovely souvenir x-ray where I have a bolt of steel through my chest.

Alrighty, on reflection this has turned into a bit of an essay, and I'm sure people will be complaining about how long it is, so I'll wrap it up. Health and hygiene are very different things here in Indonesia to back home, with people taking very different routes in order to achieve the same result. I think I've pretty much adjusted now to how health is handled here in Indonesia, painful sometimes as that may be, but I honestly cannot wait until I have hot water available at the turn of a tap again.

Thanks for tuning in!!

Animal Instinct

From as far back as I can remember, I've always loved animals. From my grandmother's cat I named Lattice as a two year old, to a baby sparrow I tried and failed to save, to my two bunnies that ran away and fornicated with wild rabbits, to my sociopath pony, to my duckling who didn't live through the night, to my beloved failed sniffer-dog but expert rabbit-hunter Bailey and to the water snail that my grandma threw out with the goldfish water. Some of my favourite memories are to do with animals I've seen in the wild; fireflies in a botanical garden in Indonesia, a lone wolf in the Rocky Mountains, a wild piglet on an adventure with my best friends. Like many young girls, my dream ambition was, for a long time, to be a vet. One I probably, in hindsight, should have stuck with, but wasn't quite brave enough to. My favourite books as a kid were Watership Down, White Fang and Black Beauty, among others. I inhaled the series Animorphs. I constantly procrastinate by wiki-ing weird animals. I still get excited about going to the zoo. I never buy leather. I stop and help bugs that have flipped onto their backs and can't get up. I rescue snails from the footpath after it rains. Point made. I like animals.

I'm still surprised, however, when I find out that other people don't get so excited about animals. Living in Indonesia for the past nine months has really opened my eyes to different standards people have when interacting with animals. While I've been living here, I've seen things done to animals that in my culture people would consider atrocities. I've seen a puppy dumped in the ocean and laughed at as it swam back only to be dumped again. I've seen a rabbit stuffed into a paper bag as a "pet" and swung around by the ears. I've seen a goat hit square in the face for bleating too much. I've seen a duck butchered on a bench rested on the cage where his still live friends stood nervously inside. Though to be fair, animals are treated better here in other ways. A lot of people don't seem to realise that in developed countries, animals, in particular chickens, are pumped with hormones, force fed until their bodies are too big for their systems to support and made to live in horrifically crowded, pitch black sheds, and never get to experience sunshine. Poultry in Indonesia tends to be smaller, and left to roam free. Ducks in particular are hearded from their homes to ponds and rice paddies, waddling their little bottoms contentedly. Cattle which tend to have more space in Australia are probably valued more as a single animal here. It's a question of balance, I suppose. However, people here tend to look at me a little wide-eyed and say, "Oh, you like animals?" as though it's quite unusual. It's definitely something they notice, though it's probably mostly just because I look strange as much as I'm doing something strange. Which brings me to what was almost the worst five minutes in a long time.

Dropping off my laundry yesterday, on my way home I looked down to see the tiny white face of a kitten peeking out of a drain. Captivated, I knelt down and tried to entice it out. It was both curious and cautious, periodically running back to its makeshift home for safety. It didn't look like it belonged to anyone, and there'd been a cat a very similar colour who was incredibly pregnant hanging around my kos a few weeks ago. I decided I'd bring it some milk and check on it later when I went to the cafe. Sure enough, it was still there, and I fed it a tiny bit of milk from a recycled Yakult container. When I went to leave, it couldn't decide whether to follow or not, and ran back and forth from it's tiny tunnel a few times in indecision. I wasn't sure either whether I should take it, though a car full of tradies driving past all suggested helpfully that I bawa aja: just take it. I'm leaving in less than a month, and I didn't want to adopt it only to abandon it again. I'm not very good at just doing nothing, though. So after checking on it a third time, I decided to buy dinner, get a box, then go collect it. However, just after I ordered my nasi goreng, a young man on a motorbike stopped and asked me whether it was me who was playing with a kitten earlier. I told him it was, and he excitedly informed me that the kitten had run across the road and had been hit by a car. I was horrified. The thought that because of me, the kitten had followed me across the road only to be swiftly killed by a passing car was awful. I nearly burst into tears while the guy told me I could probably still find its body under one of the roadside trees. Still unbelieving, I had to check for myself. I searched under the trees until the guy joined me and pointed it out. A young cat now part of a different stage of existence. It wasn't the same kitten. Relieved but saddened by this kitten's death, I checked again. My kitten was still there, mewling at me. My mind was made up; I was going to rescue this kitten.

So now, for the next month at least, I have a kitten. His name is Madu, which means "honey" in Indonesian. He's settled in to being a housecat very easily, and I'm hoping his adorable good looks and the fact that he is free, complete with all accessories and optional extras, I'll be able to find him a good home soon before I go home to mine. I don't know for certain how much I've brightened his day, but he's definitely brightened mine.

Thanks for tuning in :)