Amantiru, my Mentawai host on Siberut Island, processed sago flour using a technique not dissimilar to traditional wine-makers’ ritual of stomping grapes. He jokingly called it “dancing without music.”
Whereas the world’s most iconic staple foods are rice (commonly associated with Asia), wheat (Europe and the Middle East), and maize (the Americas), the Mentawai diet is built around sago, the starchy white powder extracted from the spongy core of certain jungle palms.
Though sometimes used as a stew-thickener in places like Malaysia, sago is most commonly eaten by isolated jungle cultures on islands like Borneo, New Guinea, and Sulawesi. On Siberut Island, sago flour is encased in palm leaves and baked over an open flame, yielding chewy, faintly sour-tasting stick-like loaves about one foot in length.
Amantiru has over the years saved what hard cash he’s earned to buy a diesel-powered grinder, which he uses to mill sago-palm logs into pulp, which is then dumped into a raised tray, mixed with water, and stomped until the flour separates from the pulp into a chalky white liquid.
This chalky liquid drips down onto a drainpipe as Amantiru “dances,” then flows into a shallow pool. Here the liquid sits until the sago power settles to the bottom in soggy clumps. These flour-clumps are extracted and packed into rattan-and-palm-leaf containers, which are transported back home for use in the kitchen.
Watching the sago-dance, it occurred to me that Amantiru more or less moonlights as a “professional traditional” – making an extra bit of hard currency each year by performing his workaday jungle routines for outsiders like myself.
As Amantiru danced, his quads and abdomen taut from the effort, I joked that this food-preparation ritual looked like something that might become the next American fitness fad – the “Sago-Pulp Workout.” Few Americans, I noted, looked as strong and comfortable in their bodies as Amantiru did.
When Agus passed along this observation, Amantiru – as self-deprecating as ever – joked that he didn’t feel strong, that he needed ten more years of practice, and by then he’d be too old to be strong anymore. “Plus, I smoke too much,” he cracked.
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. For more full-formed writing, check out my book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, or the Essays or Stories archives on this site. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
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