Authentic accent hard to find in Balinese fare

Authentic accent hard to find in Balinese fare

By Degung Santikarma

DENPASAR (JP): In the past year, a new trend in demonstrations
has emerged in Bali. Unlike others of the same name, these
demonstrations never have problems with the authorities, for
they do not stop traffic, never challenge state ideology and do
not block access to the regional legislature.

There are no banner-bearing students or reformists and
radicals giving speeches. Still, knives flash, blood flows and
plenty of steam is let off. The demonstrators are not calling for
an independent Bali or for a halt to tourist development. In
fact, foreign faces dominate the crowd.

These are local food demonstrations, held at hotels across the
island, demanding a halt to the domination of pizza, pasta and
hamburgers on the Balinese buffet.

Occupying center stage is the Balinese dish lawar, a complex
combination of meat, spices, ripe jackfruit and coconut.

Traditionally, lawar can be made from any kind of meat,
including pork, beef, chicken or -- until Greenpeace got involved
-- turtle. Its preparation is consummately conservationist, with
not a bit of the beast going to waste.

Skin, stomach, spleen, ears, feet, liver and blood all become
part of the messy mix, along with onions, shallots, pepper,
galingale, coriander, ginger, lime and a heaping handful
of chili pepper.

And lawar is not just nourishment for the body but, according
to Balinese custom, is considered to be sustenance for the social
order. It is a kind of "ritual food", prepared as an essential
accompaniment to the many ceremonies that punctuate Balinese
life.

Unlike most Balinese food, which women labor to prepare, lawar
is men's work. Gathering by the dozens in the bale banjar, the
community meeting hall, they chop and stir and fry and season
together in a kind of bloody male bonding session. Laughing,
boasting and telling tales, they prepare this traditional
delicacy to the rhythmic music of metal hitting the
chopping board and stone mortars pounding pestles, backed up by
the cries of pigs squealing at the slaughter and stray dogs
battling over whatever scraps might fall to the floor.

At these food demonstrations, held in the air-conditioned
comfort of five-star hotels, modifications need, of course, to be
made to the original Balinese recipe.

"Tourists who are worried about their cholesterol don't want
to consume all that fat," one restaurant employee explained.
"They can't handle all the red hot chili pepper and they think
that eating blood is barbaric."

Not only are the tastes tampered with, but also the
preparation and presentation. The lawar is made in the hygienic
environment of the hotel kitchen in order not to send guests
running to their rooms with a bad case of the infamous "Bali
belly".

For those foreign food fans unfamiliar with the art of eating
with one's hands, the food is dished up on fine china with
silverware on the side. But just like the Barong and Rangda,
taken from their traditional abode of the midnight temple
ceremony to perform for the morning round of culture-starved
tourists, lawar without the blood, without the sloppy fingers,
and, especially, without the communal setting, seems to lack a
certain spice.

Where, then, can one find the "authentic" tastes of Bali? As
Balinese take their place at the transnational table, competing
to cater to guests from all over the world, authenticity
has become a commodity many seem to crave. Yet finding the real
Bali deal is often about as difficult as scoring a "genuine"
Rolex watch from one of the beach vendors in Kuta.

Take, for example, the "authentic Balinese ristjaffel" offered
at one restaurant in Sanur. While it might please the palate with
its dozens of dishes, it's a Dutch colonial invention, not a true
Balinese offering.

The famous Balinese nasi campur, the "mixed rice" sold in neat
paper-wrapped packages from sidewalk stands all over the island,
includes such introduced items as tempeh, fermented soybean cakes
originally from Java, and tofu, known to the older generation as
"Chinese cheese".

Even the rice itself, in these days of economic crisis and
dwindling agricultural land, is unlikely to be the bona fide
Balinese staple.

More often than not, it's either a Thai import or one of the
high-yield hybrids brought to the island as part of the World
Bank's "green revolution" program. Even those fearless Balinese
food fanatics who venture into the local night markets to sample
the wares of the open-air warung food stalls would be
disappointed to know they were ingesting items no more indigenous
to Bali than the fare at the Kentucky Fried Chicken up the road.

Never mind that many of the vendors themselves are immigrants
to the island; some of their most palate-pleasing dishes include
Lombok fried chicken and Javanese satay in peanut sauce.

In fact, all this searching for the authentic has many
Balinese confused. For today's modern middle class, common
cultural rites of passage now include not just six-month otonon
ceremonies and tooth filings, but birthday parties at McDonald's
and initiation into the wonders of Wendy's and Pizza Hut. And it
is not just the newly affluent who have welcomed the seemingly
endless array of eats Bali now has to offer.

"Why do they want to eat fried rice when they can afford the
mie turis ("tourist noodles" otherwise known as spaghetti) at
the fancy Italian restaurant? Don't they like their own food?"
wondered one older Balinese woman, bemused by the group of
authenticity-hungry expats who invaded her small restaurant
one night.

For this woman, the modern mix of culinary commodities
available in Bali meant not that her culture was being coopted by
Western tastes but that she could include Washington apples,
Australian oranges, Bangkok bananas and New Zealand melons in the
elaborately constructed offerings she prepared for the gods who
came to feast in her family temple.

After all, if the gods do not mind being fed with the foreign
dishes, what do more worldly guests have to worry about?