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Eat at your own risk: Hygiene, poor quality remain issues in Indonesian street food
Amid plenty of choices, street food in Indonesia has several issues to overcome, including hygiene and low nutritional value.
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Food vendors at Gang Gloria Glodok in West Jakarta. Jakarta alone has around 50,000 street food vendors. (JP/Seto Wardhana)
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ndonesia is blessed with a plethora of street food vendors, offering a wide array of dishes at affordable prices. Jakarta alone has around 50,000 street food vendors, according to Stephen Rudgard, a representative of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to Indonesia and Timor Leste.
Amid plenty of choices, street food has several issues to overcome, including hygiene and low nutritional value.
Widhe Timholgit, an Indonesian living in Singapore, always makes time to eat street food whenever she is back in the country. However, four years ago, she caught food poisoning from eating local food.
“I just finished my confinement period after giving birth to my youngest son,” she recently told The Jakarta Post. When she returned home, she satisfied her cravings by eating a variety of street food, including gado-gado (vegetable salad in peanut sauce), rujak (fruit salad) and bakso (meatballs).
As she was breastfeeding her son, she avoided spicy food. Alas, she still fell sick. “I got diarrhea for around a week, which caused my breast milk to dry up. I lost 5 kilograms,” she recalled,” My son got diarrhea too.”
Widhe suspected that the street food she consumed was among the causes of the diarrhea. “I usually eat home-cooked meals,” she said.
Food poisoning is indeed among the problems faced by Indonesia, according to Food and Drug Supervisory Agency (BPOM) head Penny Kusumastuti Lukito during the Healthy Street Food Festival at Gelora Bung Karno Stadium in Senayan, Central Jakarta, on Nov. 10. "Around 20 million cases still occur every year," she added.
