Bernad Wulur is crazy about chili. Sometimes he can’t help but buy every last chili on sale from his neighborhood handcart.
“My wife and I are Manadonese,” explains the native of Sulawesi, one of the country’s main islands. “Manadonese breathe fire. We use chili in around 90 percent of our dishes. Without the fire it wouldn’t be Manado food.”
Not that Bernad’s addiction is unusual in spice-mad Indonesia, a country where even the local Starbucks sandwich arrives with a sachet of fiery sauce. “Mild” is not on the menu here.
Recently, however, Bernad’s taste buds have been getting a reprieve. Since early June, the price of chili has doubled at local Indonesian stalls, hitting hard the pockets of the country’s many spice lovers.
“I used to buy chilies at around 25,000 Rupiah a kilo [$2.70] but now the price can reach 60,000 [$6.70],” Bernad lamented. “If things don’t change soon, we may have to stop eating Manado and switch to Javanese.”
Javanese food, of course, being less spicy.
Since early June, unseasonably wet weather in Indonesia has spoiled local chili harvests, causing prices for the main varieties to rise on average by more than 50 percent, according to the Indonesian Bureau of Statistics.
For the millions of people who live on Indonesia’s two most-populated islands, Java and Sumatra, 2010 is shaping up to be a year without a dry season. The dry season was supposed to begin in mid-May and continue until September, but the west of the country has stayed rainy and overcast through July.
