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.

Thanks for tuning in!!