The Making and Unmaking of Makan (Eating): The Boundaries of Foods in Colonial Encounters in the Indian Ocean

What is food? This question vexed many a European man in the early modern empires of the India Ocean. But as they travelled the ocean’s shores, they were struck by a recurring pattern: the practice of consuming siri and pinang. Pinang was the Malay word for the areca palm (areca catechu). The practice of chewing the pinang nut, wrapped in a leaf of the siri plant (piper betle), was embedded in cultures of hospitality and diplomacy from the resplendent courts of Bantam to the bustling markets of Melaka.

This paper explores the ambiguity of siri and pinang in early modern colonial encounters in the Indian Ocean, taking the Dutch empire as our case study, which established its headquarters in modern-day Indonesia. Almost universally, Dutch men dismissed siri and pinang as food, using the verb ‘to chew’ to describe the practice of consuming the intoxicating mixture. This was at odds with the Malay term, makan, which referred as much to consuming siri and pinang as it did to eating rice, a staple in Indonesia. Even present-day scholars have often dismissed the status of siri and pinang as food. This paper argues that these disavowals must be contextualised within the gendered, racialised and classed dynamics of the colonial encounter, where women in Indonesia were invested with social status as healers and bearers of knowledge about plants. By reading European men’s accounts against the grain, the paper shows how the dismissal of siri and pinang as food reveals deeper anxieties about their cohabitation with, reliance upon, and fear of, women as producers of knowledge about the human and non-human worlds. This offers us an opportunity to unsettle categories – both colonial and scholarly – about what is food, how its conceptualisation varies in social, cultural, and especially epistemological contexts.