By Elna Tulus

Most everyday consumable commodities have some negative impact on nature and society, but there is one in particular which encapsulates the problems of the capitalist modality in its entirety – instant noodles. It is a form of ultra-processed food (UPF) which can only be manufactured in factories with machinery and food additives (Monteiro et al, 2010). It is this industrial process which enables UPF to have its desirable characteristics and to be used as part of the profit maximising strategy of corporations (Baker et al, 2025). The convenience of long shelf-life and being able to transform into tasty meal replacements in just three minutes, are some of the marketable features of instant noodles to many who are time poor around the world. Over time, more and more UPF items have been replacing traditional natural real food, contributing to the global rise of diet-related non-communicable diseases (Monteiro, et al, 2025). UPF also negatively impacts the environment throughout its different stages of production, distribution and consumption (Anastasiou et al, 2022). One way to understand this is to focus on the ingredients used in UPF like the ubiquitous palm oil used in chocolates, ice-cream as well as instant noodles. Oil palm trees are grown as monocrops at an industrial scale, causing deforestation, land degradation and biodiversity loss. In Indonesia where most of the world’s palm oil comes from, the intersection of these problems is evident.

In her latest monograph, The Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger, Sophie Chao, bridges our understanding of metabolic justice, in the biopolitical and social unevenness of “privileged guts” between humans and other beings, between indigenous people and global consumers. While Chao’s focus is on the indigenous Marind people in West Papua, one of Indonesia’s most underdeveloped regions, her exploration of hunger, food insecurity and the intrusion of UPF has resonances for consumers the world over. Through the many words for hunger used by the Marind people in different contexts, Chao enables us to understand the culture and struggles of a community who would not otherwise have a voice. The expression lapar sagu (hunger for sago) is not only used to express a bodily sensation of Marind people’s traditional food but also their observation of the symptoms of malnutrition. This community is facing unprecedented rates of stunting and wasting, attributed to the abundance of imported UPF which has contributed to bad hunger such as lapar makanan plastik (the hunger for plastic food). The consumption of instant noodles and other UPF is encouraged and promoted for Marind people to be “civilised” by the growing population of non-locals working for the Indonesian government, military and corporations related to resource exploitation projects like oil palm plantations and mining. The Marind’s traditional diet of highly nutritious meat, fish, fruits and vegetables which they hunt and forage from the forest has been impacted by changes to land use and access restriction as a result of capitalist ventures.

In this book, Chao explores how Marind people sense and make sense of hunger through their philosophies, practices and protocols. She questions how Indigenous views of hunger situated in ecology can offer useful ways of critiquing the capitalist system and its impact on nature and society through food and nutrition. Chao also invites us to think of ethics, responsibilities and politics in documenting violence of hunger. She centres hunger as an object of analysis as a way of uncovering other sensitive issues entangled in the vulnerabilities. While hunger as relation depends on “the willingness and ability of every organism to inhabit and shift across multiple and interlinked subjectivities – as feeder, as fed and as food” (Chao, 2025, p53).

Chao’s advocacy for Marind people builds from her previous monograph, In the shadow of the palms: more-than-human becomings in West Papua (Chao,2022), where she presents the Marind people’s deep connection with nature where their expression of “skin wetness” to mean healthy. In this recent publication, we are given a deeper understanding of some of the complexities in the experiences of hunger from the lens of eco-feminism. This poetic expression from one of the women who spoke to Chao summarises the implication of the animals who fall victim as roadkill, loss of community members to urbanisation and loss of their land to industrial agriculture. “Marind eaten by the road do not return to the village to feed their kin. Marind eaten by the city abandon their roots and skin in the forest. Marind men whose minds are eaten by the government and companies sell off our land and become hungry ghosts in the plantations” (Chao, 2025, p 110). These changes reflect a patriarchal system, which positions men as primary decision makers, and the patriarchal colonial-capitalist system based on dualisms of “Man over Women, White over Black Humanity over Nature” (Salleh, 2025, p30). Marind women’s perspectives have been often overshadowed by men in the community and even in anti-oil palm land rights movements, but with the growing male population from the incoming labour into male dominated industries, and government-instituted male village heads, women’s voices have been silenced more than ever before.

While other anthropologists like Deborah Gewertz, Tatsuro Fujikura, and the late Frederick Errington (2013) have documented their observation of the unexpected acceptance of instant noodles in different parts of the world, the penetration of this UPF into the diets of communities where noodles is not part of their food culture has mostly been in urban or peri-urban settings. Chao brings unique insights to the spread of instant noodles in oil palm plantations, connecting the two ends of the capitalist system, the production of the ingredients and the consumption of the UPF itself. The ubiquity of instant noodles and palm oil also demonstrates not only the power of UPF corporations but also their drive to profit from making their products available, accessible and affordable in remote locations. Chao leaves us to reflect on the excessive and insatiable hunger of this modern world of consumerism, asking “whether the material overabundance of the worlds we inhabit in fact pre-empts us from knowing hunger and the lessons that hunger as a relation might usefully teach us – about ourselves and about others” (Chao, 2025, p 170).

References

Anastasiou, K., Baker, P., Hendrie, G. A., Hadjikakou, M., Boylan, S., Chaudhary, A., Clark, M., DeClerck, F. A. J., Fanzo, J., Fardet, A., Marrocos Leite, F. H., Mason-D’Croz, D., Percival, R., Reynolds, C., & Lawrence, M. (2023). Conceptualising the drivers of ultra-processed food production and consumption and their environmental impacts: A group model-building exercise. Global Food Security, 37, Article 100688. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2023.100688

Baker, P., Slater, S., White, M., Wood, B., Contreras, A., Corvalán, C., Gupta, A., Hofman, K., Kruger, P., Laar, A., Lawrence, M., Mafuyeka, M., Mialon, M., Monteiro, C. A., Nanema, S., Phulkerd, S., Popkin, B. M., Serodio, P., Shats, K., … Barquera, S. (2025). Towards unified global action on ultra-processed foods: understanding commercial determinants, countering corporate power, and mobilising a public health response. The Lancet (British Edition), 406(10520), 2703–2726. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(25)01567-3

Chao, S. (2025). Land of famished beings : West Papuan theories of hunger. Duke University Press. https://ezproxy.lib.uts.edu.au/login?url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/jj.32155443

Chao, S. (2022). In the shadow of the palms: more-than-human becomings in West Papua. Duke University Press.

Errington, F., Gewertz, D., & Fujikura, T. (2013). The noodle narratives: the global rise of an industrial food into the twenty-first century (First Edition edition.). University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520956674

Monteiro, C. A., Louzada, M. L., Steele-Martinez, E., Cannon, G., Andrade, G. C., Baker, P., Bes-Rastrollo, M., Bonaccio, M., Gearhardt, A. N., Khandpur, N., Kolby, M., Levy, R. B., Machado, P. P., Moubarac, J.-C., Rezende, L. F. M., Rivera, J. A., Scrinis, G., Srour, B., Swinburn, B., & Touvier, M. (2025). Ultra-processed foods and human health: the main thesis and the evidence. The Lancet (British Edition), 406(10520), 2667–2684. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(25)01565-X

Monteiro, C. A., Levy, R. B., Claro, R. M., Castro, I. R. R. de, & Cannon, G. (2010). A new classification of foods based on the extent and purpose of their processing. Cadernos de Saúde Pública, 26(11), 2039–2049. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0102-311X2010001100005

Salleh, A. (2025). DeColonize EcoModernism! Bloomsbury Academic.