Going Back To Nature

Ingredients that now commonly show up in derivatives of Indonesian and Malay cuisines were once used by traditional healers for their medicinal properties.

- Rohaizatul Azhar

The use of plants and herbs to combat maladies and diseases, says UK-based naturopath and herbalist Ummahani Alkaff, have long been entrenched in the lives of the people of the Malay Peninsula. She elaborates, “The people lived in, and subsisted on, the forest that surrounded them. So, to understand the logic behind the use of these ingredients is to tell the stories of its people.”

These communities commonly used and still use plants not just for sustenance but for practical reasons as well such as materials for construction, cosmetics, and medicine. In Traditional Malay Medicine (TMM), for instance, knowledge of plants and herbs is essential as the human body is believed to constitute four elements—fire, earth, wind and water. The semangat (soul substance) of a person determines an individual’s susceptibility to various illnesses.

Ummahani shares that there is the concept of the dichotomy of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ in the human body constitution, an ideology similar to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). “There has to be a balance so, oftentimes food was categorised into ‘hot’, ‘cold’ and ‘neutral’ groups because it affected the body fluids and immunity functions of a person differently,” she explains. It is only when all four elements as well as the ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ aspects are balanced, she posits, that optimal health can be achieved.