Throughout each day, there’s one word I’d hear over and over again: makan, meaning to eat. Sudah makan, have you already eaten? Makan lagi! Eat more! After stuffing a spoonful of whatever is in front of me into my mouth, my reply is the same every time: enak, tasty! Enak sekali, very tasty!
It’s considered polite to say you like the food. During orientation, our instructors warned us that expressing dislike of a food is frowned upon; if it’s really not to your taste, you can say saya suka sedikit, I like it a little bit, and your ibu will understand your feelings about the food. We were also warned to be careful about expressing preference for something—if you ate a couple of chip packets from a specific brand, those crisps would become a staple on the living room table for the rest of the year.
Food is by far the most common topic of conversation. Each morning, as I step out of the shower, the cool water forcibly turning on my sleep-addled brain, my ibu would turn from the dining table towards me and smile, beckoning me for sarapan, breakfast. At the university, my bahasa teachers will often rant passionately about snakefruit and Javanese pastries when we’re supposed to be learning the seven meanings of the ber- prefix. When I arrive at my NGO’s event with a camera strapped to my front, I’m first led by my coworkers to the snacks section for some fried cassava on my plate with a cup of hot, sugary tea. On the way home, my Gojek driver looks in the rearview mirror and, after questioning where I’m from, asks me what my favourite Indonesian food is. In the evening, when my ayah greets me at the door, he’d always ask makan malam? Ready for dinner? If my ibu finds me lounging on the couch, she’d gesture toward the living room table, where jars of saltine crackers and cookies line up as treats for future guests. Whenever I’m sitting by the wall in my sisters’ room, typing away on my laptop, they’d always get my attention and ask if I want some of the cheese-covered dimsum they just ordered. It feels like the most important thing for them is that I don’t go hungry. It’s nice to be cared for, I think, even if it’s overwhelming at times when I fend off my ibu’s advances by circling my palm on my stomach while emphasizing that saya kenyang, I’m full.
It took me a while to understand that here, breakfast, lunch, and dinner are not represented by distinct food groups, that pan-fried chicken and vegetable soup with rice can be any of the day’s three meals. In fact, since food for the whole day is often cooked in the morning, it often becomes all three. Just as frequently, however, I’ll come home to new dishes on the table, usually in the form of oil paper wraps or brown takeout boxes stacked on top of each other, bought from various stalls in the neighborhood: bundles of chicken satays wrapped in aluminum foil, the sticks’ ends tied together with a rubber band; lele, fried catfish with bits of crispy dough that you’re supposed to scoop from the box, mix with your rice, and eat by hand; plastic bags heavy with mie ayam, chicken noodles mixed with bok choy encased in a curry-like sauce, a small bag of clear soup attached on the side; once a week, my sisters bring home two boxes of martabak, one a spongy pancake with chocolate sprinkles and cheese called martabak manis, the other a salty, eggy version named martabak telur. While everything I’ve mentioned is only now becoming familiar foods, there has always been tastes and aromas that remind me warmly of home since I’ve arrived—the scent of garlic and chopped scallions frying in the pan, the thin, flat noodles used for kwetiau, the softness of the bapao’s dough with the meaty sweetness inside. I am not home, but part of the culture I call home is alive and well here; culture, like people, is rarely isolated and fixed in place.
What didn’t take long for me to observe was how Indonesian cuisine is not particularly healthy. This is not meant to be a generalization: sayur asem (vegetable soup) is a specialty here, and it’s almost always present on the dinner table, mostly in the form of a clear soup with sweet potato leaves and bits of chopped corn. Next to the vegetable dishes, however, almost everything is deep-fried, or sweet, or both. There is a green plastic tray on the table that is always filled with fried foods: fried tempeh, fried eggs, fried chicken, fried pieces of dough with bits of carrot poking out. Fried rice is often had for breakfast. My lunch is always either a fried chicken drumstick or fried fish. There are so many kinds of fried street snacks that there’s even a word for it, gorengan, literally meaning “fried thing”. Not to mention the overwhelming sweetness of everything: the sugary pitchers of es teh cooling in the fridge, the gula aren (palm sugar) present in cups of coffee, the deep-fried banana drizzled in caramel and matcha sauce that my ayah brings home after work. Everything is incredibly delicious, of course, despite how different it all is from the way I was taught to prepare and appreciate food: spices and condiments should be kept to a minimum, in order to bring out the raw ingredient’s original flavor. The best compliment my parents would give to a dessert is that it’s “not too sweet”, something I’ve rarely said here. Even so, it is not difficult for me to enjoy a new cuisine. What worries me, however, is the nutritional consequences of consuming such a high amount of oil and sugar. Everything I’ve read on the Internet about nutrition tells me this diet is unsustainable, that these amounts of carbohydrates and fat and sugar are bad for me—yet this is what people eat, and, as I remind myself, I am here to live as people live. These reminders fail to silence the alarms ringing in my head, and an internal dilemma arises each time someone offers me something fried and sweet: accept, and I will be forcing myself to eat something I know to be bad for my body; refuse, and not only am I being impolite, but I am refusing the experience I came here for in the first place.
It is not difficult to find evidence to demonstrate that diet, like most aspects of culture, developed as a result of specific historical conditions. Colonialism is unsurprisingly at play: 19th-century Dutch colonial administration on Java island implemented the cultuurstelsel, which forced villagers to choose between using their land to cultivate export crops like sugarcane and laboring in a government plantation for sixty days each year. As a result, the Jakarta Post estimated that sugarcane exports “accounted for a third of the Dutch government’s revenue”. Excess sugar was available in cities such as Yogyakarta, where the Sultan’s sugar factories were located, which built the foundation for the essential sweetness of Jogja cuisine. Even now, a preference for sugar is deliberately engineered by multinational food companies that benefit financially from sugar addiction: for example, Nestlé was famously exposed for including large quantities of added sugar in baby food, specifically for versions sold in lower- and middle-income countries, cultivating a taste for sugar from infancy. The preference for gorengan tells a similar tale: the extractive economic system that the Dutch colonial government implemented in Java was a major cause of widespread poverty. Gorengan was popularized in response to material hardship: since fried foods require minimal technique to make, are cheap to produce (especially with palm oil, another major Indonesian export product), and can stay intact for longer in the warm and humid climate, fried foods became a central part of the modern Indonesian diet.
I find it difficult to reconcile the opposing worldviews: that I should enjoy the delicious cuisine and appreciate its significance in Indonesian culture (which I do), and that I should celebrate a culture that would not have manifested the way it did without colonial exploitation and the conditions of poverty colonization creates. In the aforementioned reflection about health, a similar pair of statements arises: that food at its core is nutrition and fuel for my body, and that food is fundamentally a vessel for connection and care. To be frank, I don’t know how to resolve these two sets of contradictions—how to view diet as both culture worth celebrating and as evidence of injustice, and how to understand food as both crucial for physical health and for building community when the aims feel opposed to each other.
I can, however, try. Perhaps it is wise to start with the easy part, how food has always been and will always remind me of connection and care and kinship beyond blood, a love language written in scents and tastes, bite by bite. Food is the physical link to memory of a specific place and time. When I say that I miss home, I am missing the hundred-year dessert shops lining old streets, the roasted geese glistening through the restaurant window, the steaming paper cone of curry-ladled fries I paid seven euros for on a snowy day. I miss my friend when I remember the pots of curry my Canadian friend cooked up with a recipe from their father, the endless common room potlucks my friends and I would host after each exam, the staggering pile of beef skewers my friends and I would order at our favourite grill place during the holidays when I returned, the softness of dough pressed between my fingers as I wrapped dumplings on the dining table with my mom, letting flour smudge all over my arm. I wholeheartedly believe that nutrition is a valuable science, but before social media influencers decreed food as only chemicals and protein as good and carbs as bad and oil and sugar as evil entities to be avoided at all costs, food had always come naturally as communion, as companionship, as the most significant receptacle of memory. I can agree with the nutritional benefits of a balanced diet and observe that I am not immune to the modern internet’s chronic obsession with health, and if I’ve chosen to come here to live life differently, I have to lessen the control that my previous mantras have on me, however appealing they may be.
The same goes for food: to appreciate food as it is and the care it contains, I have to accept that historical context, however well-researched, can never tell the whole story. It is no surprise that history is mostly unjust. Most of what we come to accept as natural today was the direct or indirect consequence of dominion and exploitation, and yet recognizing the influences of exploitation on a culture does not devalue it. After all, culture is essentially what survives. The survival strategies that individuals adapted in times of exploitation, the strategies that developed into the celebrated and loved culture of gorengan—it is resistance in the basest form. Behind the culture, there exists a terrible history, but right now, it is what it is, and it is here, and people find joy and belonging in their food, and this is the most important part of this story. A people’s history can be characterized by dominion, colonization, violence, and all these intrusions leave permanent scars—yet what matters more, I think, is that they are still here.
Before I finish my pondering, I hear myself being called for dinner, the only meal where most of the family tries to eat together. As I maneuver my fingers to pry the fish skeleton from the catfish, I catch on to the banter across the table: to my right, Nana teases Litha about her spice tolerance while scooping spoonfuls of sambal onto her plate, with Adzra laughing along. To my left, right beside Reyhan, who is focused on shoving handfuls of steaming hot rice into his mouth, I watch as ayah listens attentively to ibu describing her incredulousness at the vendor for reasons I lack the vocabulary to understand, his hands breaking the shrimp cracker apart. As the meal continues, the sisters decide to make creamy pasta tomorrow and make plans to go shopping for cheese and sausages. Ayah tells Reyhan to eat more vegetables, which Reyhan reluctantly obliges. Amidst the conversation, I bask quietly in the warmth of the meal and company. How lucky it is that I get to share this meal with strangers kind enough to invite strangers into their home. How lucky am I, I think, to have met strangers who chose to love strangers.
The food on the dinner table is neither solely a colonial product nor stripped down to nutrients and calories. It is, before all else, dinner with family, because that is what people themselves understand meals to be. I think everything goes back to treating people as people, and here, that means to treat food as food, to not only observe but, more importantly, to participate. To reduce someone to their historical circumstances, to only understand someone through the lens of analysis, is to deny them personhood and their narrative of their own life, while denying myself the honor of participating, however briefly, in the narrative of that life. What a privilege it is to be a part of someone’s story. What a privilege it is to eat together. What a privilege it is to eat.
Referenced articles:
Sugar Fever: A Complex Tale of Love, Loss and Public Health (2022)
https://www.thejakartapost.com/longform/2022/06/23/sugar-fever-a-complex-tale-of-love-loss-and-public-health.html
Bagaimana Nestlé Membuat Anak-Anak Kecanduan Gula di Negara-Negara Berpendapatan Rendah (How Nestlé Makes Children Addicted to Sugar in Low-Income Countries) (2024)
https://stories.publiceye.ch/nestle-bayi/