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?