Warteg: Middle-Low Class Solution for Expensive Healthy Food
Let’s take a look at your online food delivery application on your phone and see how much a so-called healthy food costs.
Call it salad bowl, vegan burrito wrap, grilled chicken breast, and so on, do any of them cost less than IDR 20K?
Unfortunately in the world where degenerative diseases such as stroke can affect the younger generation, overpriced healthy food seems to be unreachable for every class.
As this may propagate that nutrient-rich foods must be expensive to possess a premium quality, middle and lower class often exclude them from their diets.
However, in reality, Indonesians do indeed have traditional local bars who sell healthy food in a way that does not damage your budget and it is called warteg.
Ranging from low budget protein sources such as boiled eggs and tempeh to high-end nourishing foods such as gurame bakar and ayam bakar, warteg has it all.
Ironically with the current rise of exorbitant nutrient-dense foods, our favorite traditional local bars seem to be left out. People have reformed the definition of healthy food to an extent it sits beside the expensive category.
People prefer to eat ayam geprek which is high in calories and fats!
Warteg: From Tegal to All Over Indonesia
Originating from Tegal, warteg or warung tegal was first intended to serve the middle to lower class.
The idea was first coming from two local villages in Tegal, in which they communally managed the warteg for 3–4 months until their shift is up and the next person will be in charge after.
Right now, the idea of warteg has been disseminated throughout the provinces and you can find them around the corner of your local residence.
Although there is an abundant amount of warteg now, all warteg have one thing in common: they only cook foods that do not require much utensils in the making or even in the eating.
Warteg Food: How Healthy It Actually Is?
As warteg sells various foods, a single product can be processed in several ways.
Tempeh, for example, are deliciously cooked into many cuisines: tempe tepung (deep-fried flour-coated tempeh), tempe bacem (stew-lookalike tempe), tempe orek (pan-fried dice-sized tempeh), or simply tempe goreng (fried tempeh).
All those cuisines, although derived from the same product, possess different amounts of calories and nutrients due to the process in the making.
A piece of tempe goreng approximately contains 34 kkal with 2 grams of proteins while a piece of tempe tepung takes 72 kkal and 3,83 grams of proteins from your daily nutrients intake. On the other hand, 100 grams of tempe orek costs 175 kkal and gives 13,11 grams of proteins.
What is more interesting is that a single tempe goreng costs for IDR 2K while you can have a handful of tempe orek for IDR 3K!
The calories are considerably low and the protein are moderately high, especially for non-fried tempeh products.
Offering various amounts of nutrients and calories from the cuisines they sell, warteg gives more autonomy to the customer in their purchase decision-making.
WARTEG FOR COLLEGE STUDENT
College students are vulnerable to engage themselves in poor dietary habits as they have a limited budget to spend every month and barely make money to sustain their college life.
With high spending on college stuff such as textbooks and transportation fare, often they curb their budget on food consumption and decide to purchase an instant noodle for IDR 2K for nearly everyday.
Instant noodle itself is a junk food that lacks proper nutrients and contains a high amount of sodium which can lead to hypertension and in turn, stroke. This trend is what the epidemiologist has been observing in young adults.
Yet, the existence of warteg is a rescue for them: it is indeed cheaper and healthier than instant noodles!
Warteg is an answer for college students who seek a better lifestyle to avoid getting degenerative diseases at such a young age.
Nonetheless, warteg does not come without any drawbacks.
Young people have always been preferred for something instant; thus walking to local warteg (although under certain circumstances it is less than 500m from the location they reside) may cost them energy!
However, come to think of it, choosing healthy food over the junk one when they both cost the same to your budget should have been everyone’s priority and the energy to walk is really something worth to sacrifice for.
When both cheap, healthy food and junkies co-exist in the same budget, the choice is completely yours to decide.
