The Rice Eaters

 

Sometimes the most terrifying monsters are the ones we invite to our dinner table every single night.

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There’s something downright unnatural about a nation’s love affair with a single grain of rice. Something that makes your skin crawl if you think about it too long—which most folks don’t, and maybe that’s for the best. But I’m telling you this story anyway, because somebody’s got to, and because the truth has a way of eating at you from the inside out if you don’t let it breathe.

It started back in 1948, when the country was still young and bleeding from its birth wounds. President Sukarno—now there was a man who understood power, understood how to make people need things—he got himself a proposal from a fellow named Ignatius Joseph Kasimo Hendrowahyono. Hell of a name for a man with hell of an idea.

Kasimo was the Minister of Food Supply for the People, which sounds nice and official until you realize what it really meant: he was the man who decided what went into every Indonesian mouth, what filled every Indonesian belly, what dreams every Indonesian family would have at night. And Kasimo, God help him, had fallen under the spell of something that would haunt this archipelago for generations to come.

Rice.

Not just any rice, mind you, but the rice. The one grain to rule them all, you might say, if you had a taste for irony and a stomach for the kind of horror that creeps up on you slow, like cancer or debt or the realization that you’ve been living someone else’s life for forty years.

The Kasimo Plan, they called it. Sounds innocent enough, doesn’t it? Like something your kid might cook up for a school science fair. But this plan had teeth, had claws, had an appetite that could swallow whole provinces and still come back hungry for more.

See, Kasimo wasn’t some bureaucratic pencil-pusher. This man knew his business. He’d graduated from the Middelbare Landbouwschool in Bogor—that’s a fancy Dutch agricultural school for those keeping score at home—and he’d spent his whole adult life with his hands in the soil, his mind wrapped around the mysteries of what makes things grow and what makes them die. He understood that food wasn’t just about feeding people; it was about controlling them.

And control, friends, is the oldest magic there is.

The plan was simple, elegant, and absolutely fucking terrifying in its scope: they would plant rice everywhere. Superior seeds, they called them, though superior to what, nobody bothered to ask. Abandoned lands in Sumatra would be brought back to life, but only for one crop. One plant. One obsession.

It was like watching a man fall in love with his own reflection and then demanding the whole world look exactly like him.

Sukarno ate it up—literally. The rice subsidies he handed out to civil servants, military, police, everyone who mattered in the grand scheme of keeping power where power belonged—it all came in the form of rice. Not money, not choice, not freedom. Rice. As if rice cooked into a meal were the only food that could fill a human belly, the only thing that could quiet the ancient hunger that lives in all of us.

But here’s where the story gets really interesting, where the shadows start to lengthen and the temperature drops a few degrees: it didn’t work. Not the way it was supposed to, anyway.

Pierre van der Eng—and don’t you love how these academic types always show up to document the disasters after the fact?—he wrote about how the whole system started eating itself from the inside out. The Rice Purchasing Agency and the Food Supply and Distribution Agency, they were supposed to work together like hands clasping in prayer. Instead, they fought like cats in a sack, all claws and yowling and blood on the walls.

“The rice purchased failed to reach its destination,” van der Eng wrote, and if that doesn’t give you chills, you haven’t been paying attention. Because when food can’t find its way to hungry mouths, when the very system designed to nurture life starts strangling it instead—well, that’s when you know you’re dealing with something that’s grown beyond human control.

Regional officials started hoarding rice like it was gold, like it was love, like it was the last good thing left in a world gone mad. “We need to meet local needs first,” they said, but what they really meant was: “This thing we’ve created is bigger than us now, and we’re all just trying to survive it.”

By 1956, Sukarno had birthed something even more monstrous: the Rice Purchasing Agency Foundation, which would eventually grow into BULOG—the Logistics Affairs Agency. Now there’s an acronym that should make every Indonesian wake up in a cold sweat. BULOG became the most influential food supply institution in the country’s history, a bureaucratic beast with tentacles reaching into every rice paddy, every grain silo, every family dinner table from Aceh to Papua.

But here’s the kicker, the thing that’ll really make your blood run cold: even Sukarno, the architect of this whole rice-drunk nightmare, started to see what he’d unleashed. Too late, of course—it’s always too late when you’re dealing with monsters of your own making—but he tried. God help him, he tried.

Near the end of his reign, the old Proclamator started talking about corn. Corn! Can you imagine? After decades of rice-fever, rice-madness, rice-dependency flowing through the nation’s veins like some kind of agricultural heroin, Sukarno wanted to introduce a second crop to the Indonesian table.

He even published a cookbook—Mustikarasa—in 1967, filled with recipes for local foods, diverse foods, free foods. But by then, Sukarno was already yesterday’s strongman, and the book hit the shelves like a ghost story nobody wanted to hear. Because by then, Suharto had taken the palace, and Suharto had plans of his own.

Plans that made Sukarno’s rice obsession look like a mild case of the sniffles.

Suharto didn’t just embrace the rice monster—he fed it steroids and set it loose on the countryside. The Green Revolution, he called it, which is like calling a house fire a “warm glow enhancement program.” Under his watch, Indonesia became one of the world’s largest rice importers while national production struggled to hit 12 million tons. The math doesn’t lie, folks, even when the politicians do.

And the people? The beautiful, long-suffering Indonesian people? They fell deeper under the spell. By 1981, rice consumption had jumped from 53.5 percent to 81.1 percent. Four out of five meals built around this single grain, this one plant, this obsession that had grown tentacles and wrapped them around the throat of an entire archipelago.

“You haven’t eaten if you haven’t eaten rice,” became more than just a saying—it became scripture, became truth, became the kind of lie that’s so comfortable nobody wants to give it up.

But here’s what really gets me, what makes this whole story feel like something that crawled out of the darkest corners of human nature: there were alternatives. There always are.

Down in West Java, the Cireundeu indigenous community had been eating cassava rice—rasi—for generations. They’d built their own cooperative, controlled their own prices, lived their own truth. They didn’t bow down to the rice god, didn’t let outsiders tell them what should fill their bellies or their children’s dreams.

In Central Java, folks had been eating sorghum for centuries. Tough plant, sorghum. Grows anywhere, asks for nothing, gives everything. But it got labeled as “second-class food,” as famine food, as something you only touched when the rice god had abandoned you completely.

And in Papua—sweet Jesus, Papua—they had sago. Sago. A plant they called “mother,” a food that had sustained them since before the first Dutch ship showed up on their shores. But the rice monster was hungry, always hungry, and it wanted Papua’s belly too.

The presidents came and went—Habibie bartering airplanes for glutinous rice, Wahid and Megawati importing their way out of food crises, Yudhoyono creating the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate that carved up Papua like a Thanksgiving turkey.

And now we’ve got Prabowo Subianto with his Free Nutritious Meal program, and guess what’s still the star of the show? That’s right. Rice. Always rice. Forever rice.

The Coordinating Minister for Food says they won’t import rice for the program—they’ll source it from Cianjur instead. Local rice for local bellies, which sounds progressive until you realize it’s still the same old song, same old dance, same old monster wearing a fresh coat of paint.

Because that’s the thing about monsters, friends. They don’t die easy. They adapt, they evolve, they find new ways to sink their teeth into your throat. The rice monster has been feeding on Indonesian dreams for over seventy years now, and it’s grown fat and sleek and powerful beyond measure.

And every night, in millions of homes across thousands of islands, families sit down to dinner and place rice at the center of their table. Not because they have to anymore—hell, most of them don’t even remember why they started—but because the monster is hungry, and the monster must be fed.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if they all just… stopped. Put down their rice bowls, picked up some cassava, some sorghum, some sago. Told the monster it wasn’t welcome at their table anymore.

But that’s a different story, and probably a scarier one than this old world is ready to hear.

For now, the rice eaters keep eating, and the monster keeps growing, and somewhere in the distance, you can hear the sound of superior seeds hitting fertile soil like bullets finding their mark.

Welcome to Indonesia. Population: 275 million people and one very hungry monster.

Guess which one’s winning.