Nurul Nazipah’s favorite dish to cook is one that involves going into the Muaro Jambi forest to pick from among 120 different types of herbs and edible greens that grow wild. To the untrained eye, they could be weeds in the Sumatran forest, but to Nazipah each one has its own identity. It could taste mild, earthy or sometimes bitter. To complete her prized rempah ratus belut dish, she also needs an eel caught fresh from the Batang Hari River.

“This richly spiced traditional dish has a distinct, fresh flavor and was historically prepared only during special occasions,” Nazipah says. But it’s not just the taste of the dish that fills her with pride. She says it also showcases how rich the forest is as a resource. “Through this dish, we can highlight the potential of local food sources that are still abundant in our surroundings.”

Nazipah is among the local women from the Dusun Karet Market, popularly known as Paduka, near the 7th-century Buddhist temple complex of Muaro Jambi, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The Paduka women, who cook for temple visitors, concoct their dishes using diverse traditional ingredients. They say they want to do their part to show how their home is a living landscape steeped in heritage.

As their eight villages are found within the Muaro Jambi temple complex, also spelled Muarojambi, they wanted to make sure the recipes remained authentic. While they say they didn’t have any books they could turn to, there was one record they could rely upon: the bas-reliefs of another ancient Buddhist monument, the 9th-century Borobudur on the neighboring island of Java.

The stone carvings of daily life showed what would have been eaten when their own temple was a thriving educational center, which drew worshipers from as far away as China and India. Among the stone carvings they could see 63 plant varieties and 52 animals, including root crops, baskets of rice, sugarcane, sago palm, deer, buffalo, fish and coconut. A purveyor of jamu, an ancient health drink made from fruit and spices, is also among the figures.

Now, one year since they began preparing their menu for tourists, they’ve served 8,000 visitors and created a shift in the local diet of their community. The women also established an ancient food forest and garden to conserve the diverse wild plants and varieties on their menus.

But it wasn’t always like this.

As with other regions in the world, diminishing local ingredients and processed food had started to encroach on the villages’ way of life. When the local women first cooked food for tourists on the grounds of the temple complex, they thought their dishes were too humble for visitors. So instead they served store-bought instant noodles to the travelers who had spent the day winding their way around the 4,000 hectares (nearly 10,000 acres) of the complex’s archaeological sites.

Previously, we felt that Muaro Jambi’s traditional dishes were perhaps too modest and might not appeal to many people,” says Nazipah, also the executive secretary of the Paduka community. “However, we’ve come to realize our dishes have their own unique character — something that may not be found in other regions.”

In May 2024, they joined former lawyer Helianti Hilman, who founded Javara in Jakarta, a startup that promotes Indigenous foods from around Indonesia. With the help of Javara’s food anthropologists, the Paduka community started mapping their food culture.

The anthropologists joined them as they foraged in the forests and rivers, and the women spoke to their grandmothers to learn what ingredients their great-grandparents used. Over the decades, local communities had moved toward processed food, they said, and these conversations gave them time to rediscover their food heritage steeped in the region’s local biodiversity.

A menu from the land

While they wanted to create a local menu, the women thought they should still go to the market to get “elevated” ingredients for foreigners. But the Javara team encouraged them to source from the land. The island of Sumatra is a biodiversity hotspot with a rich landscape of fruits, vegetables and rainforests, as was the island of Java, home to Borobudur, from where the Paduka community got their inspiration.

Fadly Rahman, a food historian at Padjadjaran University in West Java, tells Mongabay that Java’s food biodiversity in the 7th century was shaped by its fertile soil and early cultural and trade exchanges with India, China and Arabia. About 350 bas-relief panels in Borobudur depict some of the produce they enjoyed.

“The ancient Javanese used Javanese chili, turmeric, ginger and galangal [and] trade contacts with India and China introduced new ingredients such as pepper, garlic and soybeans,” he says.

Soon the Paduka community had gathered recipes such as rempah ratus belut (“hundred-spice eel”). They also chose to celebrate the ikan mudik (“homecoming fish”), various species of freshwater fish that are caught during the flood season when the water drives them upstream. People dry the fish to eat them as fermented, salted or processed as kerupuk (crackers). They also wanted to serve the slightly bitter rattan shoots from the banks of the Batang Hari River, which only the most skilled forager can collect due to the plant stem being covered in barbs.

Shop-bought sauces were switched for arenga vinegar, the fermented sap of the Arenga pinnata palm tree, used as a dip for grilled fish.

Then, to quench their thirst, they decided to serve daun cepiring (Gardenia jasminoides) tea, made from gardenia leaves and known for its healing properties, and jamu, the 8th-century fruit-and-spice concoction.

While the women knew how to forage in the forest for herbs and edible plants, they only knew the local names for their finds. The Javara team showed them how to use an app to help identify each plant and list the health benefits for visitors.

On May 18, 2024, the women went to Javara in Jakarta for a weeklong bootcamp to try out their ideas. They designed a dining experience, created a menu, and delegated roles in the kitchen. Over the course of two days, they ran a pop-up kitchen at Javara and sold tickets to the public to see what kind of reception they would get. When they returned to Muaro Jambi in Sumatra, they decided to sell this new menu to tourists.

Helianti says that because they sourced the ingredients from the forests, the Paduka women thought the prices suggested by the Javara team were too high. But any initial fears were quickly quashed.

“Once they [saw] that people come and pay [a lot of] money for the experience, they started to realize, ‘Hey, we are sitting on a gold mine,’” she says.

When they returned to Muaro Jambi, the women stopped serving factory-made noodles to visitors on the temple grounds and began serving endemic snakehead fish and cepiring tea.

Conserving diversity

As they revived recipes, Helianti says it wasn’t just the visitors who saw a change in their diet, but people in the villages too. “I think that’s what’s really interesting, because even their own diet changed,” she tells Mongabay. They too would choose store-bought food, but now they had renewed pride in their food heritage.

Alongside the agrobiodiversity botanical garden and ancient food forest that the women nurtured on the temple grounds, they also changed what they plant in their own gardens. Where they once grew tomato and Chinese cabbage, they’ve now started to grow herbs and spices from native seeds gathered from the forest.

They also cook their recipes in the same way as their ancestors. They replaced the paraffin stoves that they previously used to cook instant noodles for tourists, with a traditional wood-burning terracotta stove. Styrofoam lunch boxes have been replaced with boxes made from the leaves of the betel nut tree (Areca catechu).

They make sure they don’t overharvest in the forest by only taking what they need, members of the Paduka community tell Mongabay. Instead of stripping an edible wild plant of all its leaves, they will take one or two from each plant, as they do with the rempah ratus belut recipe.

Veera Sekaran, a professor at the National University of Singapore who specializes in regenerative nature-based solutions, says this is a sustainable way to grow food near a forest ecosystem. “Obviously, the carbon footprint is very small or if not negligible,” he says. “These regenerative practices take into consideration the forest biodiversity and local soil microbiome and ensure the resources replenish themselves.”

Over the past century, human diets have become less diverse. Although humans have historically cultivated around 6,000 plant species, today just three — rice, maize and wheat — now supply 50% of global plant-based calories, according to a report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Fewer than 200 plants are commonly consumed, and only nine dominate global crop production. Researchers say this reliance increases vulnerability to climate change, pests and disease, and contributes to micronutrient deficiencies. The FAO warns that 25% of wild food species are declining.

“We are homogenizing our diet to few crops that aren’t resilient,” Chris Kettle, a scientist at Bioversity International, an NGO that seeks to increase agricultural and tree biodiversity, told Mongabay in an interview about the FAO report. “When we diversify our diets, and reduce our dependence [on just a few main crops], we could really have much more sustainable landscapes that sustains much more diversity.”

Fadly from Padjadjaran University says ancient culinary traditions in Java began to weaken with the development of the fast-food industry. “Modernity does not mean total elimination, but slowly dimming the practices and authentic flavors of ancient culinary heritage,” he says. He adds that some ancient culinary traditions remain, such as tumpeng (a cone-shaped rice dish served at celebrations) and also fermenting techniques to make tempe (or tempeh) from soybeans.

By December 2024, the Paduka community was hosting banquets on the temple grounds, picnics in a bamboo forest, and brunch on a boat. In the temple complex, they created a pop-up restaurant.

More than 8,000 visitors have now eaten their heritage dishes. Where they once charged 50,000 to 150,000 rupiah ($3 to $9) for instant noodles, now they can get up to 1 million rupiah ($60) for their heritage dishes. The profits have helped pay for a new community center in the temple complex, which hosts their pop-up restaurant.

Indonesian restaurateur and food writer Kevindra Soemantri says his visit to Muaro Jambi left a huge impression on him. “I realized for decades [we] kind of [became] detached from our culinary wisdom. The Western world of today [has embraced the] craze for permaculture, while in ancient Indonesian culture, permaculture was part of everyday living.”

Also a former MasterChef Indonesia contestant, Kevindra says he ate dishes that he had never tried before, including the hundred-spice eel. “It was complex, very fragrant, spicy … The eel was fried and slightly smoked before [being] cooked with the herbaceous broth. It was very memorable for me.”

Back at the temple grounds, members of the Paduka community say they hope more travelers can experience their agrobiodiverse heritage. “There is a special sense of pride and joy for us,” Nazipah says.

Banner image: The Paduka community cooking for visitors. Image courtesy of Javara.

Citation:
Colozza, D. (2022). A qualitative exploration of ultra-processed foods consumption and eating out behaviours in an Indonesian urban food environment. Nutrition and Health, 30(3), 613-623. doi:10.1177/02601060221133897