World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [20]
Bean Curd or Chicken Feed?
Between bean curd and chicken feed, which would have been the better business bet in 1920s Southeast Asia? It’s hard to imagine two humbler products. As it happens, a bean curd industry in Java and a chicken feed industry in Bangkok emerged around the same time. The first, operated by indigenous Javanese, has remained virtually unchanged for eighty years and today is suffering badly from globalization and market competition. The second, founded by two Chinese brothers, is now a $9 billion global agro-industrial conglomerate.
In 1920, in the east Javanese town of Mojokerto, a local Javanese woman started manufacturing bean curd in a bamboo shack. Soon afterward, four similar bean curd factories appeared. This part of town became known as the “Bean Curd Neighborhood,” because almost all of its inhabitants over the age of ten were involved in producing bean curd in one way or another. In his 1963 book Peddlers and Princes: Social Change and Economic Modernization in Two Indonesian Towns, anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes the production process:
Bean-curd, a small piece of which most Javanese eat with every meal, and which is probably their major source of protetin, is made from soya bean. . . . The beans are soaked in water for about six hours until they become mushy. They are then ground between one fixed stone and one movable one, the movable one being rotated by hand through an ingenious spindle-and-pulley arrangement suspended from the ceiling. The result of this operation, which may take a half-hour or so, is a semiliquid pulp which is then screened for major impurities and cooked in a large vat for several hours. This cooking is an attention-demanding job because the pulp must be added gradually, can by can, and must be stirred continually. While still boiling, the cooked product is now screened again, this time through a piece of cheesecloth stretched over a vat, and vinegar is added to cause the by now milk-like substance to curdle. The separated liquid is siphoned off, and the curds are placed in a bamboo tray to dry in the sun, this whole straining, siphoning, and curdling process taking perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. When, in about an hour, the curds are dry, or reasonably so, they are carefully molded into squares through a process of enclosing them in a small piece of cloth and dextrously folding the cloth into a flattened cube. Next, the little patties thus formed are pressed even dryer with a flat board, and then they are fried in deep fat for about a half-hour. Finally, they are wrapped separately in paper for sale; and this, as bean curd does not keep, must take place within a day or two of manufacture.
31
These details of bean curd making are worth noting not just for the craft, but because they have remained essentially unchanged for eighty years. Today, tofu manufacturing in Indonesia is still a cottage industry, in the hands of small indigenous producers, many of whom cater to street vendors. In Jakarta’s smog-filled streets, hundreds of these vendors peddle their ta-fu and tempeh (fermented tofu cakes) in pushcarts known as kaki lima, or “five-legs,” for the two legs of the peddler, the two wheels of the cart, and the post it rests on. According to a 2001 Javanese bean curd industry website, the equipment used to make tofu still consists of the “rolling machine, wok, boiler, soaking basin, and boiling basin.” Of the thousands of Javanese families that have engaged in this business since it began, none has introduced major technological innovations or become dominant through greater efficiencies. Nor has there been any product diversification or vertical integration to speak of.
Globalization and economic liberalization, moreover, thus far have brought only pain for Indonesia’s tofu producers. Whereas soybeans were locally grown when Geertz described Mojokerto’s tofu industry, Indonesia today imports most of its soybeans from the United States. When the rupiah