Indonesia grows no wheat, and eats instant noodles by the billion

Indonesia does not grow wheat, and it is still the world's second-largest eater of instant noodles as well as one of the top five exporters. Dr Elna Tulus, who recently finished a doctorate at the University of Technology Sydney, told the Talking Indonesia podcast at the University of Melbourne that this is not a story about national taste. The World Instant Noodles Association counted more than 124 billion servings eaten worldwide in 2025. Indonesia's share of that is built on flour that arrives by ship.

Tulus traces how it happened. Food aid to Indonesia fell to almost nothing in 1965, the year of the mass killings of suspected communists, then rose sharply from 1971. That was the same year Bogasari, then the largest wheat mill in the world, opened at Tanjung Priok in Jakarta. Wheat came in as aid and stayed as an industry. Her thesis sets Australian wheat farming beside Indonesian noodle eating and calls the result gastro-capitalism. Ordinary people supply the labour that keeps the food system running, and they are also the market it sells back to, so the profit goes to the companies at both ends. Indomie's success overseas is her main example.

The health argument is blunter. Instant noodles are ultra-processed food, engineered to be hard to stop eating, very convenient, high in calories and low in nutrition. Eating them can also hide food insecurity, because a household that has switched to packets does not look hungry in the figures. Tulus says the blame then falls on families for making poor choices, while the firms that decide what gets planted, milled and put on the shelf are rarely asked about theirs. When the host asked whether eating fewer noodles is the answer, she pointed instead to local food and food sovereignty.

Why it matters

If your food budget bends around the price of a packet, the thing to know is that the flour inside it is imported, so a weaker rupiah reaches the shop before it reaches the headlines. Tulus's argument also moves where the decision sits: skipping a packet is a household choice, while the crops, the mills and the shelves are decided far above it. Treat a cheap, filling meal as a sign of what the food system offers, not as proof that people are eating well.