http://www.insideindonesia.org/feature/white-rice-or-black-sago-28101484
White rice or black sago?
Saturday, 29 October 2011 06:03
Maskota Delfi
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On the island of Siberut, eating rice is both a status symbol and a sign of
destruction of traditional ways
Maskota Delfi
A road being made through a sago forest
Maskota Delfi
‘It makes your hands dirty while eating’. When I lived recently for several
months in the village of Muntei on the island of Siberut, I heard local people
say this a lot about roasted sago. Roasted sago indeed blackens and chars when
it cooks, but it is something the people here eat almost every day. Siberut is
part of the Mentawai Archipelago, 100 kilometres off the coast of West Sumatra
in the Indian Ocean. Sago is the main staple food for the people of the
archipelago. Even so, Mentawaians increasingly prefer to eat rice, if they can.
Yet attempts to grow rice on the island have failed, despite government efforts
to encourage its cultivation and to create a local population self-sufficient
in food. A few irrigated rice fields close to the homes of migrants, who would
probably have grown rice anyway, are the only tangible result of the
government’s attempts to promote rice cultivation. Like most indigenous
residents of Siberut, the people of Muntei don’t plant rice. They say it is not
part of their tradition. It’s also difficult to grow in the swampy areas at the
back of their village.
Why the taste for rice?
If they don’t grow rice, why do so many of the people of Mentawai not only like
to eat it, but also think it is better than sago? The short answer is that rice
has become a prestigious symbolic food, due both to its price tag and its
imported nature. In Siberut, if you are able to consume rice a few days a week,
you are classified as being well-off. Such a diet indicates that you are in
business, or that you sell cash crops which enable you to buy food, instead of
having to work outdoors to harvest your own.
Moreover, local people value rice not only because they see it as a luxurious
food for the wealthy, but also because they value it as being ‘modern’ and
‘developed’. Mentawaians notice that sago is not usually eaten by the city
people and others they watch on television in the evenings. Instead, it is
considered a ‘primitive’ food, eaten mostly by remote Papuans, upstream Dayaks
or by people in islands a long distance away, such as in Maluku.
This attitude is also reinforced by the government sponsored family food
supplement program, Raskin, which is short for ‘beras miskin’ or ‘rice for the
poor’. In Mentawai, as elsewhere, that program does not supply the local sago
staple food, but rice to poor families. The social signal this program sends is
that ‘everyone should have rice to eat’, reinforcing the message that sago and
taro are second grade foods.
A status symbol
During a recent field trip to Mentawai, I had an interesting experience while
living with a local family in Muntei. Every day for several months, we sat
together and ate sago with condiments for lunch and dinner. In the mornings, we
enjoyed a variety of cooked bananas, taro, tubers and cassava snacks. It was
our habit to have lunch and dinner at the back of the family’s traditional
Mentawai house, near the kitchen.
Mashing sago is demanding physical work>
Maskota Delfi
One day, the family’s oldest son, who was about 18 years old, came home for a
visit after recently being employed in a workshop in Muara Siberut, a harbour
town about ten kilometres from Muntei. He arrived with a full ten kilogram bag
of rice. The youngest, six year old Edo was very happy and asked his mother to
cook rice for lunch. After the food was ready to be served, I put some plates
out on the just-swept floor in the kitchen, but instead Edo’s mother asked me
to take the plates to the front of the house on the veranda.
This surprised me because normally we would eat lunch conveniently in the
kitchen area. In answer to my question why we should move to the front, she
responded that it was too hot to eat in the kitchen. Her reasoning was
unconvincing, but she was firm, so the plates and pots were moved to the
veranda. While helping me to carry the plates and glasses to the front, Edo
explained: ‘If we were eating sago today, it wouldn’t matter if we had lunch in
the kitchen. Kak [older sister], we are lucky, we eat rice today, so it’s
better to have lunch on the veranda. There people can see what we are eating.
In the kitchen they can’t.’
It became clear that the family didn’t want to hide the occasion of eating rice
from others in the village. People are proud when they eat rice. Besides,
serving rice to guests is now considered to be more courteous and a sign that
you are honoured by their presence. It seems that it is no longer enough to
honour guests with sago. Since hearing this explanation, I observed similar
situations in other settings.
A staple food
Sago palms proliferate around Muntei village because of the abundance of wet
and waterlogged soil there. When people cut down a sago tree there are always
some saplings in the vicinity which will take its place. After about eight
years, the new trees are ready to be harvested. Normally, one good mature sago
tree can produce sufficient starch for a family of four or five for about eight
to ten weeks. A whole trunk of processed starch will not spoil for many months
if stored with care in tapirs (cylinder-shaped containers made from sago
leaves) and left standing in a cool place in the house.
A harvested tree will normally produce about half a dozen good size tapirs.
About 60 per cent of the trunk contains starch. The process of collecting the
sago starch requires a large sieve, a big spiky rasp, a dugout canoe and plenty
of fresh water which is always easy to find. When the sago tree has been
felled, it is cut in sections and split in two. People then grate the pith or
heart of the tree with the big rasp, releasing the starch and inedible fibres.
They then put this mixture in the large sieve on a platform and with nimble
feet and plenty of water wash the fibres and collect the starch in the dugout
canoe underneath the sieve.
Ritual which ends with a sago meal
Maskota Delfi
The wet starch settles quickly on the bottom of the canoe and the water can be
reused to wash the next batch of mixed starch and fibres. The fibres are spread
around in the field and used to fertilise the next stand of trees. When the
canoe is filled with wet starch, leaves of the just-felled sago tree are
arranged to make a tarip. The sago starch which looks like wet flour but feels
like clean coarse mud is packed inside the tarip. This is carried home and
covered.
Often a harvest of sago might be shared by two or three families, who take it
in turns to fell the palms, because the taste of the starch is the best in the
first four to six weeks after harvest. Every meal time, sago is roasted in
sections of freshly-cut bamboo. Each piece of bamboo is about 30 centimetres
long and, filled with sago flour, is roasted in the fire for 20-30 minutes.
When it is ready, the hot roasted bamboo containers are taken from the fire. It
is now easy to break open the bamboo and take out the hot bread-like sago from
the inside. Dip it in a condiment of spicy or salty vegetables, meat or fish
and you have a substantial meal.
There is also a quicker way to roasting sago, but for this you need plenty of
sago leaves to wrap up the wet sago flour and nimble fingers to make sago
breadsticks which, when roasted at the back of the fireplace, produce a nice
crunchy stick when unwrapped. Locals eat this second variety for breakfast when
the sticks are still hot. You need four to eight roasted sticks (called
‘kapurut’ in the local language) to feel full. You can eat them without
condiments, and they are a practical way to start your day, alongside a glass
of coffee or tea.
Besides being a food source, the sago tree provides other benefits to the
community. Sago leaves can be used to make one of the sturdiest thatched roofs
in Indonesia They are a useful wrapper for roasting sago breadsticks or for
making tapir, as mentioned above. They are also make a resilient wall material.
In addition, the strong sago palm bark can be used for flooring and it burns
well in the kitchen fireplace.
Parts of sago trees such as the crown, which does not contain starch, will
eventually drop to the ground and in combination with other tree litter, will
decay and become the perfect host for sago beetles. The grubs of this beetle
are an easy catch and a delicious and much sought after protein source. In sum,
the sago palm is a valuable multipurpose plant for the people of the Muntei
community.
New cash crops
Rolling a sago log back to the village
Maskota Delfi
Recently, the local office of the Ministry of Agriculture has assisted in the
introduction of cocoa as a cash crop in the Mentawai archipelago. Many newly
planted cocoa fields can be seen around the village. Other areas, where sago
used to grow in abundance, have been cleared to make way for further plantings.
The new cocoa farmers who have occupied land near Muntei sell their dried cocoa
beans to traders in the village or in Muara Siberut.
When people grow cash crops in order to purchase foodstuffs, they run risks if
they don’t back up their production with staple crops. When they grow cash
crops, communities often are not aware that their stock is subject to the ups
and downs of global prices. For instant, a bumper crop in African cocoa can
lead to a slump of the price in West Sumatra, while a frost in South America
can lead to higher prices.
For now, sago is still valued in the community. In many of their local rituals,
the villagers in Muntei still use sago. Even though roasted sago is black,
which for some people means tainted or dirty, many locals are still proud of
this useful, meaningful and tasty food. However, there’s now a question about
how long it will remain a regular item on the menu of future generations.
That’s a pity because, for me, roasted sago with a sprinkle of coconut beats
any processed breakfast cereal.
Maskota Delfi ([email protected]) is an associate lecturer at Andalas
University in Padang, West Sumatra and recently submitted her PhD in
anthropology at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta.
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