During my Bridge Year experience in Indonesia, there’s one word I’d hear over and over again every day: 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 that you enjoy 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 ibu¹ 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.

To share and compliment food is a common kinship-building tradition across a wide variety of cultures, and the verbal act itself is a familiar practice. However, living in an environment with a foreign tongue—both linguistically and gastronomically—encourages a curiosity about the contents and act of such communions, as well as their historical origins. Hence my observations regarding food in Indonesia: as I participate in the daily rituals of eating and talking about eating, I developed a curiosity for the formative relationship between its national diet and the various histories that contributed to its present state.

As the most common topic of conversation, food remains the most accessible window through which to observe Indonesian life. 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 Indonesian language teachers rant passionately about snakefruit and Javanese pastries when we’re supposed to be learning the seven meanings of the ber- prefix; my NGO coworkers often greet me with fried cassava and hot tea; my taxi driver always starts the conversation by asking about my favorite Indonesian dish. In the evening, when my ayah² 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. 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.

Having lived in Asia for the majority of my life, being pressured to eat until you’re filled to the brim was not a new experience. What surprised me were the comparisons in diet and cuisine: though the year has opened my palate to enjoy many new textures and spices, the aromas here have reminded me warmly of home the moment I’ve arrived—the scent of garlic and chopped scallions frying in the pan is recognizable to anyone who frequents night markets on Chinese streets; the thin, flat noodles used for kwetiau happen to be my mother’s favorite Cantonese order, though my region favors salt over sugar. Whenever I eat bapao, I’m reminded of the piping hot char siu pork buns I used to grab from convenience stores before running to school. Some hundred years ago, Chinese traders sailed to Indonesia for trade, and through settlement had woven themselves into the grand tapestry of Indonesian culture—a thread that threatened to break many times in history—woven by people I had never known and will never know; it is this thread that, decades later, speaks to me through a whiff at the stall, a steamed bun in my hand. Now tell me history is an irrelevant subject to our lives. Tell me how you can separate the economic from the cultural, the cultural from the political, the political from the personal, and still attempt to articulate a true story.

I am selfishly grateful that part of the culture I call home is alive and well there; culture, like people, is rarely isolated and fixed in place. But what differentiates between a culture and diaspora that emerged as a result of trade and integration, and a culture whose method of entry was racist violence at its purest form? How does a decolonized nation reconcile with a past so thoroughly etched by the direct and indirect influences of a colonizer culture? How does the tapestry of culture survive and evolve even when burdened with additions that, though woven in harshly and unnaturally, have already become part of the art? 

The answer is again articulated with a culinary example. It didn’t take long for me to observe 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. Fried tempeh, fried eggs, fried pieces of dough; fried rice is often had for breakfast; 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, but I soon became worried about the nutritional consequences of consuming such a high amount of oil and sugar. What I’ve read on the internet about nutrition tells me that this amount of carbohydrates and fat and sugar is bad for me—yet this is what people eat, and, as I remind myself, I am here to live as people live. Yet these reminders often fail to silence the alarms ringing in my head. Each time someone offers me something fried and sweet, a dilemma occurs: 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 joined Bridge Year for in the first place.

It is not difficult to find evidence 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 in 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 cuisine 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-old dessert shops lining old streets and the roasted geese glistening through the restaurant window. I miss my Canadian friend when I remember the pots of curry they cooked up with their father’s recipe, the potlucks I’d host with friends post-exam, 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. Yet, before social media influencers decreed food as only chemicals with moral worth—protein as good and carbs as bad and oil and sugar as evil entities to be avoided at all costs—food had always existed naturally as the most significant receptacle of friendship and 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. More importantly, 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 its colonial history: 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—are resistance in the basest form. Behind the culture, there exists a terrible history, and maybe it is a futile exercise to separate that culture from the violence it has endured to become what it is today. But maybe the exercise itself is misguided: after all, we are in the here and now, 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, my homestay sisters tease each other about their spice tolerances while scooping spoonfuls of sambal onto their plates. To my left, right beside my homestay brother, 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 my homestay brother, who reluctantly obliges, to eat more vegetables. 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 treating 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 the 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.

1. Ibu is a common Indonesian term of address for adult women, though it formally means mama. Here, I’m referring to my homestay mother. ↩
2. Ayah is the Indonesian term for father. ↩

Kongyang Zhu is a contributing writer for the Nassau Weekly.