Contrary to my previous, irrelevant to our time article, this time I will bring it towards a more related topic: Nutrition in Indonesia. It is certain that at this point you have heard of a magic potion that will make sure you do not get COVID 19 or will quickly cure you from it. You can eat ginger, jug gallons of water or perhaps some alcohol will help kill the virus. And even though these tips are clearly unscientific and any adult with working brain-cells should be able to tell the snake oils from the real medicine, one thing is certainly true: your nutrition can help your immune system. So how easy it is to find proper, healthy food in Indonesia?
To give you an early answer, it is very hard. Well, it depends on where you live. I am sure that in a big metropolitan city like Jakarta, you can even find actual snake oil if you look hard enough and like I have mentioned before, Bali is the Mecca for food you can post with the hashtag #healthfreak (anybody using that hashtag?). But I don’t live in places like, I live in a small city in Borneo, so healthy options are harder to come across. Indonesian food can be rather delicious, don’t get me wrong, but healthy and tasty don’t go hand in hand.
First, if you are a fan of the oven, then good luck, cause almost all home food here is either fried or boiled, with no oven in sight. I am sure that there are houses with ovens, but it is not the norm. So, boiling can be healthy, I guess, but frying definitely isn’t, especially when frying with Palm Oil. You have to understand one thing, I come from a Mediterranean country, there is no oil, other than olive oil. So, when I am frying or cooking with palm oil, each time I die a little inside. Of course, for deep frying or anything similar olive oil is not great, but toasting bread in palm oil, must be a culinary offense. And fried food is the most you will find outside. Fried chicken, fried rice, fried noodles are the most common and cheap choices and same goes for a lot of sweets, like fried banana. Thus, if you want an affordable meal, then you need to fry it and wave you veins goodbye (or are the arteries the ones clogging?).
Key word to my previous paragraph is affordable. Yes, you can still find and buy olive oil or Greek yogurt or fruits and vegetable to make a salad, or you can even buy a salad from outside, but prepare to pay a lot of money. A healthy lifestyle is expensive everywhere, of course. Spaghetti will always be cheap and easy, while making a meal with enough fruits and vegetables to make you full, is much more expensive. But here it is even harder. When a meal of nasi goreng from a street vendor costs 13.000 rupiah and to make a proper healthy meal will cost you more than 20.000, then you can see that healthy eating is not for every day. Of course, you will buy many vegetables that will last for more than one meal, but still if you combine that with the spices and sauces and oils you need to buy, especially if these are imported, the price seems to be more, anyhow. Buying out is even worse. There is literally one salad place in Samarinda (except for Pizza Hut, which their salad sucks, is expensive and pretty unhealthy anyway) that I manage to find in my seven months here and their salads cost 40.000 rupiah. Compare that to the 13.000 nasi goreng, which you can find anywhere, and you see how unequal the choices are. You, however, can also find some type of soups like bakso or soto, which seem to be healthier and are not expensive.
There are of course plenty of places that offer salad buah. It has salad right in the tile it must be good, right? No! Don’t make the mistake of ordering this thing. I am still baffled about which twisted mind came up with the idea of this monstrosity. Okay, maybe I am exaggerating, but they take fresh perfect fruit and they put it in a weird, semisweet soup of water, syrup and other things with jelly and sometimes cheese or mayo on top. Sounds delicious, doesn’t it? Generally, this is a trend in Indonesia, eating food raw is not really a thing. Maybe that’s why salads are not particularly popular. It could be because the high temperatures and the questionable preservation techniques makes the food dangerous to eat raw most of the time, but after so many boiled and fried food, I am just craving a crunchy carrot.
Despite the atrocities done to fruit in salad buah, it is easy to find it on its own, away from weird soups, plentiful all year round. However, although being a personal preference, I don’t like tropical fruits. Except for the amazing bananas, which are the best fruit ever and nobody can have a different opinion, papaya and mango are pretty indifferent, pineapple can good though, then there are the many many small ones, that all look and taste like lychee, like rambutan, which are pretty meh and have a weird texture and of course there is the hubris of durian and the jack-fruit. Most people know durian as the smelly, disgusting one, but jack-fruit is equally as bad. Although not as smelly as I expected after watching reactions online, eating either of them is not a fun experience. There are always Asian pears and apples, but they are as indifferent as they are in the west. In the end there is plenty of fruit, but if you are a berry lover like me, prepare to either pay or miss them. Oh! There is also dragon fruit, which is okay, I guess, nothing amazing, which seems to be the trend with tropical fruits.
Lastly, let’s go to dairy. You wake up in the morning, happy to have a glass of fresh cow milk, oh what a lovely day. But wait you are not in Indonesia, cause here fresh milk seems impossible to find. All milk, I have been able to find, can be kept even outside the fridge and their expiration date is at least a month. Powdered milk is very popular as well. Besides that, it is hard to have plain milk, as all seem to be at least slightly sweetened. Cheese, except for cheddar, will be other nonexistent or extremely expensive and the same goes for butter. You can find margarine, but it is just not the same. That doesn’t mean, that cheese or butter are healthy choices and you are missing out nutritionally, necessarily, but I just want to mention than once I go back to Greece, I will buy 1KG of feta cheese and eat it all.
Indonesia has plenty of culinary interest, especially if you are just visiting. It has plenty of tasty food also, so taste away. But if you are living here and you are tired of eating boiled food and you don’t have lots of money to spend, then finding healthy, not fried food can be a struggle, that you will have to learn to live with.
The Indonesian Chronicles 