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Food

An Eaters Guide to Indonesian Land Conflicts

A coalition of Indonesian chefs and foodies don't want anyone to forget the scores of local farms we lose to development every year.
All photos by author

The "farm-to-table" concept is all about knowing the source of your food. But what if that source is under attack? One Jakarta-based collective is forcing diners to confront that very question with a series spotlighting the farmlands and communities that are under threat from development and big business.

The collective recently held its first themed dinner at the test kitchen of the nation's largest food distributor PT Sukanda Djaya, offering diners a five-course meal made from ingredients sourced from farmers in Kendeng, Central Java. That region has been the center of a high-profile land conflict between small scale farmers and a state-owned cement company for years.

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The Rembang farmers, led by brave women who have encased their feet in cement in protests outside the State Palace, say the cement factory will ruin their farmland—a mountainous region that's richly fertile but erroneously dismissed as a barren wasteland by public officials.

The community won a court battle against a mining company that would've dug up limestone for the cement factory, but the factory is going to be built anyway.

While the land conflict has already gotten plenty of headlines in Indonesia, Aulia Reinozha, the spokesman for Third World Culinary Co., thought that everyone was missing something here. These were farmers, local people growing local food in a country still struggling to attain food security. Why not raise awareness of the issue with food sourced from the farms of Rembang and send the proceeds back to the farmers themselves.

"We've acknowledged that the process, the respect, and the understanding of our food and its origins is slowly being forgotten," Aulia told me. "People don't care about their food."

A coalition made up of Third World Culinary Co., Barong Indonesia, Jakarta Supper Club, and PT Sukanda Djaya, purchased labu, jagung muda, and ubi from Kendeng. The shopping list wasn't without issues. The chefs asked for talas—a local root vegetable—but they got the talas stems instead. That's because the farmers typically sell the actual root vegetable at the market and eat the plant's tough stalk at home. It's a local food staple, but it's one that needs to be cured before it's even edible.

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The vegetables were paired with pricey proteins like Australian Wagyu steak, foie gras, and barramundi for seven dishes that were delicious and edifying. The chefs were the real thing, each of them running the kitchens of popular eateries like Maple & Oak and St. Ali. They say they all got together out of a shared concern over the future of Indonesia's agricultural producers.

"We worked in food, we surrounded ourselves with the culture, the economy, the academia of food," Aulia said. "But we saw a problem. We were sacrificing the biodiversity of our agriculture for global commodities."

The collective also invited Yu Sukinah, a prominent member of the Rembang resistance, to deliver a speech to the diners. She's one of the "Kartinis of Rembang," the women who cemented their feet in protest and led the region's fight against the cement plant.

Sukinah was an inspiring figure, a woman who had only recently learned formal Indonesian and still struggled with her smartphone. She was dressed in a traditional Javanese outfit and watched as the room of upper class urbanites ate a meal made from her village's staple crops. It was a bit awkward, and likely pretty strange for a middle-aged woman who spent her whole life in a remote agrarian setting. But she said that she was willing to do anything to raise awareness of their fight.

"I hope our food security will always be preserved," she said.

The collectives' members explained that there were still so many hurdles in place for farmers from communities like Rembang. It costs too much to get the crops to market and the local food industry is only concerned with well-known produce—which means that while many Indonesians might be familiar with talas, few have eaten its stalk.

It also means that local chefs often rely far too much on imported ingredients.

"Farmers in Indonesia need to take pride in what they're doing," said Kade Chandra, of Barong Indonesia. "Usually they grow vegetables to fill the quotas of whole sellers. The quality of these vegetables isn't a big concern. And that only pushes chefs to import more often."