28/04/2026
Rice is Life. Nasi adalah kehidupan.
Have you ever heard that saying?
I have. Over time, in countless kitchens across Bali, in villages I’ve spent my days in, and in conversations with farmers who carry stories passed from father to son to father again.
For over 2,000 years, the Balinese grew rice the way the gods intended.
One harvest. Maybe two. Farmed by whole communities. Water flowed through temples before it reached the fields.
Seeds saved season after season, generation after generation, all for the next life of rice.
One farmer from the Karangasem district of East Bali said it best…
“We must not take water just for ourselves, much less sell it. We borrow the water and return it just as we found it. We make daily offerings to the water, and water will be provided as long as we respect it.”
That is the world that existed before the 1970s.
And then everything changed.
The Green Revolution arrived.
And it was nothing like it sounds.
It wasn’t about nature.
The name was formed from politics. Green as the alternative to Red, meaning communism. To me It was the original greenwashing as we know it today.
The strategy was simple, flood developing nations with high yielding corporate seeds so that hunger and therefore political instability,could be controlled. Genius really.
It worked, in the strangest sense.
Yields went up.
But in the process, ancient seed libraries were erased, sacred farming traditions were broken, waterways were poisoned, and self-sufficient farming communities became dependent on chemicals they had to buy every single season.
In Bali, Suharto’s government forced farmers off their heritage seeds.
Those who refused were imprisoned.
Yep that's right! Can you imagine that?
Fields of traditional varieties were burned. The new hybrid seeds, IR5 and IR8 rice needed fertilisers and pesticides just to survive.
The sacred subak, a thousand year old water management system woven into temple life, was overwhelmed within years.
The Balinese cropping calendar, the sacred 210 day Pawukon cycle that had synchronised planting with ritual for centuries, no longer matched the accelerated schedule of the new rice.
Older farmers remember their fathers describing those first harvests as extraordinary.
Yields shot up. For one or two seasons, it seemed the government had been right.
It didn’t last.
Within a few years came pest explosions, water chaos, and crop losses of up to fifty percent of crises that a thousand year old system had never once produced.
And now, fifty+ years later, people are scared of rice.
They’re scared it will make them fat.
Give them diabetes.
And here’s the painful truth, they're not completely wrong.
But it’s not rice they should be afraid of.
It’s what was done to rice.
Walk into any supermarket in Bali, Jakarta, or anywhere in the world and what you’ll find is white, polished, chemically grown commodity rice in a plastic bag.
Stripped of its bran, its fibre, its slow burning starch.
Grown fast, harvested often, processed hard.
That is not the rice that kept the Balinese lean and strong for two millennia.
That is the industrial product of the Green Revolution.
And yet it’s the rice being blamed for obesity, the blood sugar spikes, the diabetes, conditions that are genuinely rising across Indonesia.
We see it first hand when customers come into Jhoii for a meal, asking, “please remove the rice”……
People are cutting rice from their diets on advice from wellness culture, while the actual culprit of what was done to the seed, the soil, and the system goes unexamined. It's heart breaking for me to witness a food culture so old, so magnificent be unexplained to the younger generation.
Heritage rice, whole, unpolished, slow grown, tells a completely different nutritional story.
This is what we choose to purchase and serve to you at Jhoii.
Different starch structure.
Different response in the body.
Different relationship with the land it came from.
It is not the same food, even if it carries the same name.
Rice didn’t betray us.
We were told to betray rice.
The subak still stands.
The terraces still cascade.
The seeds are still here, in the hands of farmers who never forgot.
That ancient understanding, borrow, return, offer, is what the Green Revolution asked farmers to abandon.
Some never did.
And because they didn’t, the knowledge and the temples and the living seed are still holding something that no hybrid variety ever could.
The conversation about what to eat, and what truly nourishes, is only just beginning.
Nasi adalah kehidupan.
