Healthy Street Food in Jakarta

 

 

Instead of eating home-cooked food, people in these neighborhoods buy the cheapest meals they can: food from street vendors.  The equivalent of 20 cents in Jakarta can buy a meal of rice fried with soy sauce and a little chicken, or deep fried fish cakes.  Ten cents will buy a snack.   Overcrowded, kitchenless housing has given rise to a culture of street food that has done wonders for tourism in Asian cities — the most crowded parts of the planet.  But it has also condemned tens or hundreds of millions of people to an almost nutrition-free diet.

Mercy Corps couldn’t think of anything traditional that a nongovernmental group could do about this.  So it did something very untraditional:  in April, 2009, it started a healthy street food business called Kedai Balitaku, or My Child’s Café, that has since spun off into a for-profit company.  “The idea was to provide access while raising awareness about healthy food and creating economic opportunity,” said Sean Granville-Ross, Mercy Corps’ Indonesia country director.

via NYTimes.com.

B4E Summit: Former MTV Presenter Urges Youth to Act Now

 

 

Former MTV presenter Nadya Hutagalung will speak at the Business for the Environment (B4E) Youth Dialogue to encourage her young peers to care for the environment.

“We owe it to them to take these kinds of initiatives. To see that they’re also passionate is really moving,” Nadya said.

She said it was important for young people to immediately get involved in efforts to protect the environment because ultimately they would become adults in the world left to them by older generations.

She said young people must “educate themselves on everything related to climate change, because unless you understand what is going on, you have no reason to feel passionate about it to make a change.”

Approximately 200 students will be present at the B4E Youth Dialogue.

via The Jakarta Globe.

Global Companies Slated to Go Green At Business Meet

 

More than 200 companies from around the globe are expected to attend a key summit in Jakarta this week, where they will sign a pledge to cut their carbon emissions and adopt eco-friendly practices.

The commitment is one of the highlights of the Business for Environment summit (B4E), led annually by the World Wildlife Fund, which runs from Thursday through Friday. A pre-summit event it held on Wednesday.

The meeting encourages executives and entrepreneurs to help solve pressing environmental issues by creating green economies, protecting biodiversity and reducing their carbon footprints. It also promotes the UN’s forestry conservation program.

via The Jakarta Globe.

How far is Jakarta from becoming a livable city?

Jakarta has been serving as the capital of Indonesia and a center of business activities for decades.

With an area of 661.52 square kilometers, Jakarta is home to 9.6 million people (2010).

In addition, every workday approximately 1.1 million people enter Jakarta from the neighboring cities of Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi for work or school.

How are people coping with daily life in Jakarta? Have we achieved livable city conditions? There are five fundamental aspects of livable cities: regional connections, walkability, strong neighborhoods, a network of attractive public spaces and affordability. Do we feel better and healthier? Let’s look at the conditions of our daily routines.

Have we ever thought that our daily commute to the office, school, or other activities should be a joyful, safe and interesting trip? Jakartans hardly find such a pleasant situation in their daily trip. Most of us, especially people from around Jakarta, start the day by leaving early in the morning, often before sunrise, to reach our destinations.

The number of private vehicles is estimated at 8 million which fill Jakarta’s streets, which account for only about 6.2 percent of the city’s total metropolitan area.

If the government relies only on the business as usual strategy to overcome the chaotic traffic, people will be trapped in congestion for a long time, rather than enjoying the trip. And slowly but surely, our daily trip will become a source of psychological stress.

via The Jakarta Post.