Today, to their relief, a renaissance of Bornean traditional food culture is underway.
Faced with the climate crisis and disruptions to global supply chains, people around the world are seeking more sustainable and localized sources of food, leading to a resurgence of indigenous food practices. In few other places has the revival been as dramatic as in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, located on the northwest coast of Borneo, where about 40 percent of the 2.5 million residents have indigenous heritage.
Malaysian chefs who leave for fine dining restaurants overseas return to Sarawak, venturing into the forests to forage for rare jungle produce, such as wild durian flowers, which sometimes bloom for less than a week . Families who inherited the endangered practice of harvesting sugar from mangrove palms have found new champions among conservationists. An hour from Kuching, the state capital, a petite 65-year-old woman from one of Sarawak’s hill tribes, the Kelabit, receives a revolving door of guests – chefs, researchers, amateurs – eager to learn what she knows about cooking. with plants and insects found only in the rainforests of Borneo.
The aromatic stems of wild ginger, tepus; baskets of juicy sago worms, oulat mulong; and bouquets of twirling jungle ferns, noon, found in Kuching’s wet markets, only scratch the surface, said Mina Trang-Witte, 65. Many of the plants she harvests have no English translation; some have no name at all. “I’m just a simple village cook,” she says, smiling shyly from her airy home atop the forested hills. “Now all of a sudden everyone wants to see me.”
While indigenous food knowledge has been eroding for centuries in places like North America, it has faded “dramatically rapidly,” within a generation or two, in developing countries in America South and Southeast Asia, say environmental researchers. Today, the tide is turning: in the countries that share the Amazon rainforest, indigenous leaders are enjoying new popularity. Last year, four restaurants in Lima, Peru, were among the world’s 50 best restaurants – a credit, the chefs say, to their indigenous Amazon suppliers.
In Sarawak, many say indigenous culinary culture received its biggest boost in 2021, when the United Nations’ cultural protection agency UNESCO named Kuching one of its dozens of “cities of gastronomy”, citing the combination of its biodiversity and indigenous heritage. Since then, heritage food festivals and events have flourished in the city. A new gastronomic center is under construction. And late last year, Antoni Porowski, the food and wine expert on the TV show “Queer Eye,” came to film part of a new National Geographic documentary series, “No Taste Like Home”.
The growing profiles of dishes like Asam Siok — chicken marinated over a wood fire in bamboo stalks — and Nouba Laya — steamed Bario highland rice puree leaves – marks a sea change from just a decade ago, when the stories told about Sarawak’s indigenous culture were mostly tales of loss, said Karen Shepherd, a Kuching-based writer who serves as point focal point for UNESCO designation. “We are now in a phase not only of renaissance but also of massive experimentation,” she said. “There is a real feeling of uniqueness of being [Indigenous] in a global context. »
More and more young Sarawakians – some with indigenous heritage, some without – are learning indigenous methods of picking, smoking and fermenting. Many also offer their own interpretations of these practices and find ways to commercialize them, giving rise to new, sometimes tense, debates about the future of indigenous culture.
In interviews with The Post, more than a dozen chefs, brewers, restaurateurs and tribal elders said they believe what Sarawakians want is not to restore indigenous ways of life, but to integrate certain aspects of it to address contemporary challenges, from underinvestment in East Malaysia, where Sarawak is located, to the climate crisis.
In 2021, stuck at home during the pandemic, four Sarawakian millennials of different ethnic backgrounds met on Zoom to talk about their love for the food of their home state. They launched the Sarawak Food Incubator and last year organized the first-ever tuak festival, an indigenous rice wine traditionally brewed at home by women for their friends and family.
The enthusiasm generated by the three-day festival, organized in a few weeks, exceeded expectations, organizers said. Thousands of participants came to taste and buy tuaks made by aging matriarchs emerging from wooden longhouses in remote villages, many of whom had never sold their tuak commercially before.
Among the longest queues was at the stall of Annie Tapak, a 70-year-old housewife, who was preparing tuak – or what her Bisaya tribe calls pangasi. — for three decades, spending long afternoons alone with a large tub that she kept under the washing lines. When, at the festival, she received two top prizes for her clear and refined brew, she bloomed a bright red and froze before being introduced on stage, those close to her remember.
Under the influence of Christianity and Islam, which disapproved of alcohol, the Bisaya tribe’s brewing culture nearly disappeared in the 1980s, said Peter Sawal, a tribal elder. Not anymore. “The pride,” said Sawal, 66, “has returned.”
While the pandemic lockdowns slowed the shutdown of many businesses, they were “a blessing” in that they forced young Sarawakians back home, where they had more opportunities to explore their heritage, said Culinary Heritage and Arts Society Sarawak president Dona Drury Wee. “Everyone suddenly wanted to have some form of deeper connection to their identity as a Sarawakian,” said Ehon Chan, 38, managing director of the gastronomic incubator.
A young Bidayuh woman, fresh out of college, started a tuak business with her grandmother. A biotechnology professor, frustrated by a lack of funding for his research, began learning how to make tuak from YouTube videos.
More home brewers are popping up and plans for a bigger tuak festival in 2024 are in the works. But the biggest test, Chan said, is how long the momentum can be sustained. Unless tuak brewers and other businesses based on indigenous cuisine can reach a mainstream audience, they could be considered “trendy,” Chan said.
In 2017, John Lim, originally from the capital Kuala Lumpur and married to a Sarawakian, opened a restaurant in Kuching serving high-end European cuisine using 80% locally sourced ingredients and indigenous cooking methods. Although the restaurant, Roots by Food Journal, is acclaimed for its creativity, it is a “break-even restaurant,” Lim, 36, said. Even today, it is difficult to offer higher prices for products like brioche made from the country’s butter nuts. local franckabang tree or oysters topped with a reduction made from jungle star fruit. It’s unconventional, Lim conceded, and it’s not what people are used to when looking for European or indigenous food.
However, he has no plans to change his approach, he said.
On a recent afternoon, Lim walked into his walk-in refrigerator and poked his nose at one of his favorite ingredients: canned wild garlic, buah kulim, which gives off a woody flavor similar to that of truffle. He forages in the jungle every few weeks and thinks more chefs should come and smell and taste Borneo’s bounty for themselves, he said. “There’s too much here,” Lim added, “for just a few of us.”
