Why are there threats of civil unrest when tempeh'€™s place on the dinner table is threatened? And why does this nation of tempeh eaters feel so strongly when its quality plunges due to low quality beans or adulteration with other additives?

Tempeh, despite being '€œthe poor man'€™s meat'€, has been a vital food in the diet of millions of Indonesians, especially the Javanese, who have been personally and inextricably linked to tempeh from their origins in rural Java.

Over the years, rural Javanese moved to cities. Some even became ministers, diplomats and presidents. They pretended that they had risen above the farmers and landless laborers of the countryside and ate pizza, burgers and pasta.

However, despite Indonesia'€™s rapid urban development and industrialization over the last 30 years, with almost every foreign food finding its niche in Indonesia'€™s cities, tempeh still remains the mainstay of the Javanese diet.

As a result, we have seen the country complain about the price of soybeans and tempeh over the past few weeks, and a decrease in quality to accommodate the increasingly expensive soybeans.

Many tempeh makers have substituted waste products from tofu manufacture (gembus) to mix with soybeans. Others have adulterated it further by adding cassava to pack the volume out. Even the legendary tempeh delicacy mendoan, a single-bean, thick tempeh wrapped individually in banana leaves, has hit the news, its quality destroyed after it was mixed with cheap cassava flour to be affordable in its home towns of Purwokerto and Banyumas.

'€” Jonathan Agranoff

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