The Hunger Revolution

 

Listen, and I’ll tell you a story about hunger. Not the horror-movie kind—no shambling corpses or demonic possession—but something quieter and maybe worse. The kind that gnaws at a nation’s belly while politicians make speeches and bureaucrats shuffle papers and mothers watch their children’s ribs start showing through their skin like piano keys.

This is a story about Indonesia in the 1960s, when President Sukarno—a man with big dreams and bigger words—decided he was going to save his people from starvation.

He didn’t know he was already too late.

The Thing That Came Before

Between 1945 and 1950, Indonesia was a house divided against itself. The Republic on one side, the Dutch on the other, and in between them, millions of people who just wanted to eat. Both sides controlled the rice, see, and rice was everything. Rice was life. Rice was the difference between making it through another day and not.

The Republic created something called the Djawatan Pengawasan Rakyat—try saying that three times fast—under the Ministry of People’s Welfare. The Dutch, never ones to be outdone in the bureaucracy department, formed the Voedingsmiddelenfonds Foundation and the Volksvoedings Institute. VMF. IVV. Alphabet soup for a starving nation.

When the Dutch finally packed up their colonial bags and went home (and good riddance to them), the VMF got swallowed up by the Djawatan Pengawasan Rakyat and became the Foodstuffs Foundation. The IVV didn’t fare as well—it got liquidated, which sounds like something out of a mob movie but really just meant it was shut down and reborn as the People’s Food Institute.

Now, the People’s Food Institute, they had a slogan. You gotta love a good slogan in a bureaucracy—it makes everybody feel like they’re doing something even when they’re mostly just talking. They called it “Four Healthy, Five Perfect.” Catchy, right? Like something you’d see on a cereal box, if cereal boxes existed in Indonesia in 1950, which mostly they didn’t.

The Foodstuffs Foundation didn’t last long. It got replaced by the Food Affairs Foundation, which did the same damn thing: tried to control the rice supply. Because rice, always rice, rice forever and ever, amen.

But here’s the thing about rice—and this is important, so pay attention—there wasn’t enough of it. Not even close.

The Year of Living Dangerously

By 1964, Indonesia was a powder keg waiting for a match. Nutritional inequality—that’s a fancy way of saying some people ate and some people didn’t—was sky-high. Sukarno, who was nothing if not a showman, decided it was time for something radical.

On July 12, 1964, he launched what he called the Operation for the Eradication of Nutrition Illiteracy. OPBG, if you’re keeping track of acronyms. It was part of something even bigger: the “People’s Food Revolution.”

Now doesn’t that sound grand? Revolutionary. The kind of thing that gets your blood pumping, makes you want to stand up and salute. But revolutions, real ones, they’re messy things. They don’t go the way you plan. They have a way of eating their own children, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Sukarno made a lot of speeches. That’s what politicians do, after all—they talk. And talk. And talk some more. But his message, buried under all those words, was actually pretty simple:

Stop eating so much goddamn rice.

In his Year of Living Dangerously speech—and yes, that’s what it was really called, like he knew even then that things were about to go sideways—Sukarno laid it out plain as day:

“To those who usually eat rice two or three times a day, I say: change your menu. Mix your meals with corn, sorghum, sweet potatoes, cassava, yams, and so on. That is all I ask—change your menu, and it will not harm your health.”

It will not harm your health.

You see what he did there? He’s trying to reassure them, trying to make it sound like a choice instead of a necessity. Like a doctor telling you the surgery is going to be “just a little uncomfortable.” But the people, they weren’t stupid. They could read between the lines. They knew what he was really saying: We don’t have enough rice to feed you anymore.

The Machinery of Hope

The very next day—and you have to admire the efficiency, even if the whole thing was doomed from the start—Minister of Health Dr. Satrio got the ball rolling. He set up OPBG Commands in every province, every district. Commands. Like this was a military operation, which in a way, I suppose it was. A war on hunger.

The People’s Food Institute, led by a man named Dr. Dradjat D. Prawiranegara (and don’t you love these names? They sound like incantations, like something you’d chant to ward off evil spirits), sent people out into the villages, into the schools, into the maternal and child health centers. They were supposed to educate people. Change hearts and minds and, more importantly, change menus.

Satrio documented everything in a book called People’s Food Revolution, published in 1965. Reading it now is like finding a message in a bottle from a ship that’s already gone down. All that hope preserved in print, all those good intentions turned yellow and brittle with age.

“I have established OPBG Commands in every Province and District,” Satrio said, and you can almost hear the pride in his voice, can’t you? The sense that he was doing something important, something that mattered.

Poor bastard. He had no idea.

The Targets

The People’s Food Institute had a lot of jobs. They gave lectures. They taught cooking classes featuring local ingredients—corn and cassava and things people had been eating for centuries but suddenly had to be taught to eat again, as if they’d forgotten how their grandmothers cooked. The government even organized exhibitions at the Bogor Palace, showing off corn-based dishes that were supposed to taste like rice.

Supposed to.

But here’s where it gets interesting, in that dark way that stories get interesting when you see the tragedy coming but can’t look away.

The primary target of the whole operation was housewives. The women. The mothers. The “family menu planners,” they called them, which is a polite way of saying the people who had to figure out how to keep everybody fed on less and less.

Can you imagine? Your country’s falling apart, your kids are hungry, and here comes some government official to teach you how to cook. To tell you that what you’ve been feeding your family for generations isn’t good enough anymore. That you need to change. To adapt. To make do.

They also focused on schoolchildren, pregnant women, and nursing mothers—the vulnerable ones, the ones who couldn’t fight back, who were already on the knife’s edge between surviving and not.

And they trained dietitians and nutritionists at two schools: the Nutrition Education Academy in Bogor and the High School of Health, Nutrition Department, in Pasar Minggu, Jakarta. Creating an army of experts to fix a problem that experts couldn’t fix.

The Formula

At the heart of OPBG was that old slogan, “Four Healthy, Five Perfect,” but adapted now, changed to fit the new reality. It was based on a list created by Prof. Poorwo Soedarmo, the palace’s nutritionist. A man who knew his science, who understood vitamins and minerals and proteins, but maybe didn’t understand people as well as he thought.

The list went like this:

* Carbohydrates: corn, rice, cassava, yams

* Fats: meat

* Protein: fish, soybeans, eggs

* Vitamins: vegetables

* Minerals: milk

Simple, right? Straightforward. Just eat these things in the right proportions and you’ll be healthy and strong and everything will be fine.

Except meat was expensive. Milk was expensive. Fish wasn’t available everywhere. And people wanted rice, not corn, not cassava, not any of these substitutes that tasted wrong and felt wrong and reminded them with every bite that things were not okay.

The Corn King

Sukarno loved corn. Had a real thing for it, you might say. Back in 1963, a year before the big Food Revolution launch, he’d already started pushing it as a replacement for rice. Corn, corn, wonderful corn. Abundant. Healthy. Just as good as rice, he insisted.

“Corn in our homeland is abundant,” he declared at a rally, “and according to research, eating corn is just as healthy as eating rice.”

According to research. As if research could change the taste in your mouth, the feeling in your gut that told you something was wrong.

A journalist named Oey An Siok picked up the thread, writing articles with titles like “Rice is Not an Absolute Requirement for Healthy Living.” He laid it all out logically, step by step, like a man trying to convince himself as much as his readers:

The population is growing. The rice fields can’t keep up. We can’t keep importing rice forever—it drains our foreign reserves. What if the exporting countries stop selling? We have to stand on our own feet. We have to change our menu.

Now or later, our menu must change.

Later, it turned out, wasn’t an option. But neither, really, was now.

Oey’s ideas lined up perfectly with Sukarno’s concept of Berdikari—Self-Reliant Economy. Food self-sufficiency. Standing on your own two feet without needing anybody else.

It was a beautiful dream. Dreams usually are, right up until you wake up.

The Local Solution

Here’s where the plan actually showed some promise, some real understanding of how things work in the real world instead of in conference rooms and government offices.

Satrio insisted that OPBG had to be adapted to each region. Use local foods. Respect local customs. Don’t try to force fishermen in the mountains or farmers on the coast to eat things that didn’t make sense for where they lived.

“The difference from the standard principle is that the four elements are adapted to each region’s conditions,” he explained.

In the mountains, get your protein from beans and livestock. On the coast, eat fish. Use what you have. Make it work.

The People’s Food Institute even helped communities process unusual local foods. In Gunung Kidul, they taught people how to prepare koro benguk—velvet beans—which are toxic if you don’t know what you’re doing but perfectly edible if you do. Turning poison into food. Now that’s a neat trick.

And it worked, at least in some places. Wonogiri went from banana-deficient to banana-surplus. West Java, where they introduced high-yield corn varieties, stopped reporting food shortages altogether.

Success stories. Little victories in a war that was already being lost.

The Thing That Killed It

But then—and there’s always a “but then,” isn’t there?—everything went to hell.

The Malaysia Confrontation happened. Sukarno, never content with one crisis at a time, decided to pick a fight with Malaysia. Suddenly all that energy, all those resources that were supposed to go into feeding people, got diverted into sabre-rattling and military posturing and all the expensive, wasteful business of threatening war.

“During the confrontation, Satrio envisioned building a future generation that was strong, healthy, and disease-free through OPBG,” a historian named Vivek Neelakantan wrote years later, and you can hear the bitter irony in those words, can’t you? Building a healthy future generation while simultaneously preparing for war.

The economy, already strained, started to crack. Then it started to break.

“In reality, for many people, meat was no longer affordable.”

Let that sink in for a minute. Meat—one of the five essential elements of the “Four Healthy, Five Perfect” formula—was off the table. Literally. People couldn’t afford it. So much for scientific nutrition.

The Taste of Failure

But here’s the real kicker, the thing that doomed the whole operation from the start: people didn’t want to change. They didn’t want corn instead of rice. They didn’t want cassava or yams or sorghum or any of these alternatives, no matter how nutritious they were supposed to be.

Their taste buds said no. Their memories said no. Everything they’d learned from their parents and grandparents about what real food was supposed to taste like said no.

And the distribution system—well, it never really worked outside of Java and South Sulawesi. The rest of the country might as well have been on another planet for all the good the Food Revolution did them.

So OPBG echoed through the bureaucracy, bounced around in ministries and government offices, made some women’s organizations more aware of nutrition (which was something, at least), but never really reached the people it was supposed to save.

The People’s Food Revolution was branded a failure. Partial success, maybe, in some places, for some people, but mostly just failure.

Sukarno’s big dream of changing how an entire nation ate—of weaning them off rice and onto corn and cassava and whatever else was available—died not with a bang but with a whimper. With millions of people quietly, stubbornly, continuing to prefer rice even when there wasn’t enough of it to go around.

The Lesson

So what’s the moral of this story? What are you supposed to take away from this tale of good intentions and inevitable failure?

Maybe it’s that you can’t change people just by telling them to change, no matter how good your reasons are. Maybe it’s that hunger is a monster that doesn’t care about your plans or your slogans or your nutritional science.

Or maybe—and this is what keeps me up at night, if you want to know the truth—maybe it’s that some problems are too big to solve with speeches and programs and government operations. That some kinds of hunger run deeper than the belly, down into the soul, into the very idea of what it means to be human, to have dignity, to eat the foods you grew up eating and not have to settle for substitutes.

Indonesia in 1964 was a nation eating itself alive, and all the corn in the world couldn’t save it.

The People’s Food Revolution failed.

But the people?

They survived.

They always do.

That’s the real horror story, when you think about it. Not that the program failed, but that people kept living through it, kept going day after day with not enough food, with the wrong food, with the knowledge that their leaders couldn’t or wouldn’t save them. That survival itself became a kind of slow torture.

And they called it a revolution.

Some revolution.