Rice is Life

After living in Indonesia for almost a decade, then returning to the US during COVID to support family, Toraja Mountain Coffee’s Chief Coffee Officer Charlie Kodatt recently returned to the place where our story starts.

This is the second part of his journey back to the mountaintop farms in Toraja - arriving in Bali.

In Indonesia, from Bali  to Toraja, rice is eaten three times a day. At least. There’s a saying in Indonesia that if you eat a meal without rice, it doesn’t count as a meal.  

Rice is everywhere. Rice fields blanket the landscape. There are so many derivatives of rice, it’s mind boggling, and each derivative has about 1,000 by-products made from it.  

Rice is so central to life that you’ll be eating a cake and not even recognize that it’s made of rice flour, with just sugar and milk.

Rice is life. Enjoy it. Be happy. Try new things. Travel. See, smell, taste, feel and listen to the world around you. We’re lucky to be alive here on Earth. No place reminds of this more than Indonesia.