Being the staple food for most of Indonesia, any controversy regarding rice tends to immediately capture the public’s attention, especially when that controversy is over whether the rice we’re eating is actually rice at all.
There has been a new plastic rice scare in Indonesia recently (there was also one in 2015, which was thoroughly debunked by lab tests) spurred on by the short video, above. It shows several office workers accusing a Padang restaurant in Central Jakarta called Mini Jaya of using synthetic rice made of plastic in their takeaway boxes.
The workers came to the conclusion after one of them managed to roll a ball of rice, without any rice sticking to her palms, and bounce it off a table almost like a golf ball.
Mini Jaya has denied the video’s claims and have reported them to the police for defamation.
“We have questioned the plaintiff and are investigating their rice,” said Tahan Marpaung, head of the Crime Investigation Unit at the Central Jakarta Police, as quoted by Kompas yesterday.
However, the police have not yet identified the workers in the video nor who originally uploaded it to the internet.
Nur, an employee at Mini Jaya, said it’s normal for their rice to bounce when rolled up into a ball like in the video.
“Our rice is soft, not sticky, and not hard. So if it’s thrown against something it’ll bounce. It doesn’t contain plastics, no rubber, it’s all natural,” he told Kumparan last week.
Hardiansyah, agriculture expert at the Bogor Agricultural University, said it makes no sense for people to mix or substitute rice with plastic as plastic costs more than rice.
If anyone still needs more convincing, Kumparan posted this video of an experiment they did comparing the bounciness of warm vs cold rice (hint: the colder the rice, the bouncier it becomes when rolled into a ball).
