Welcome to the blog for Colgate University's interdisciplinary course on food. This is the place to keep up with what students in the course are experiencing in their work at Common Thread Community Farm and through their everyday encounters with food.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Balinese Food

Exactly a year ago, I ventured with a few of my friends to the island of Bali in Indonesia. My food experiences there were so interesting and so involved with many facets of Balinese life, much of which I have only begun to appreciate recently. We took a car to the center of the island where a man trying to get his foot in the door of the booming tourism industry charged us the equivalent of $25 US dollars for a tour of his land and home cooked food. We were greeted at the home he'd grown up in, and where he and his brothers still lived, consisting mainly of raised, open air bedrooms with tile floors and an intricate personal Hindu temple and graveyard. And we were greeted by food and tea:

There were small vegetable patties and balls of sweetened rice wrapped in dough in a wooden bowl. There was black tea and brown granulated sugar.


Our guide took us on a hike around the land his family owned and farmed (mainly with rice). It was huge, stepped fields, deep river ravines, palm trees and heat. A small black dog followed us the entire way, around single cows stationed in little huts in the middle of fields (their manure was used for fertilizer), around a man on a motor bike strapping bags of rice to carry home and working on his English with us, around wind chimes hanging from wooden sticks to ward off evil sprits in the fields and help the rice to grow. It was a complex, interwoven system of family and food, of sustenance and system.


We made our way to a hut where the wife and daughter of our guide were cooking what they referred to as a "traditional Balinese meal." I was unsure whether this meant it was something that people used to cook before Bali was taken over by tourists and before Balinese grocery stores stocked food produced in other countries (such as salmon teriyaki flavored Lays). Or, if it was a meal they still ate today. Regardless, it was heavenly.

                  

Much of it was wrapped in long stalks of grass, and we were taught how to weave tiny baskets with the grass strips where rice would have been placed in the morning for men to carry out into the fields to eat at lunch. It was different than any meal I'd ever had, different textures and styles of preparation. The emphasis was on rice used in many ways and on flavors. 

Our guide cut open a fruit for us he'd picked from a nearby tree, we were eating rice that had been grown in their own fields and vegetables from the plot outside the temple, it was all so local. 

 

And yet, I wondered what their day to day relationships with food actually looked like. Our meal and experience was meant to be novel, we were tourists and these people asked us again and again to recommend them–they wanted to make it special for us. But did our guide head to the nearest grocery to feed his family or did they eat as locally as we just had? I didn't think to ask it at the time, but in Bali I fear that tourism is taking over and making a commodity out of everything. I participated in the commoditization of their food, and their culture, but I wish I had gotten deeper with this family and gotten to know how they truly ate.

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