Indonesia began treating stunting as a national priority in 2017, when the government launched a strategy to speed up prevention, starting in 100 districts. The urgency was clear. According to the Basic Health Research survey (Riskesdas), 37.2% of children under five were stunted in 20131.
By 2024, national prevalence had fallen to 19.8%. In some regions however, the problem remains severe. That year, East Nusa Tenggara had the highest prevalence of Indonesia’s 38 provinces, at 37%2. In South Central Timor prevalence was 48.3% in 20213 and 50.1% in 20234. The second highest of any district in the country. Despite years of interventions, stunting remains a persistent problem for families.
Kopernik had worked in West Timor since 2013, starting with our Wonder Women Program. The relationships we built over the years brought us closer to the challenges communities faced, and in 2021, we joined local efforts to address stunting in South Central Timor. Before implementing anything, we did research. We interviewed village heads, community leaders, posyandu (integrated health post) cadres and District Health Agency staff to understand what was driving stunting and what families needed. The most common challenge was getting nutritious food on the table every day. Household budgets were tight, parents had little time to cook and children were reluctant to eat healthier food. These findings led us to focus on local ingredients and the practical skills to prepare them. They shaped our intervention strategy, including workshops where mothers identified local foods and developed recipes together.
I came to this work as an outsider with a problem to solve. Over the following years, working alongside health cadres, mothers and farmers, I came to see another side of the region.
People in South Central Timor eat remarkably well when local food is on the table. They cook with corn, purple sweet potato, red beans, arbila beans, moringa and several kinds of banana and plantain. Dishes such as purple sweet potato porridge for toddlers, sorghum simmered in coconut milk, and moringa puddings are nutritious, filling, and delicious. Yet, as instant food becomes more accessible and convenient, this cooking knowledge is beginning to fade. It deserves to be celebrated, and preserved.
Research supports this focus on local food. A 2026 study in Food Policy found that more than 98% of Indonesians could afford a diet that meets national guidelines using the cheapest locally available foods5. Poor diets, the authors concluded, are driven not by cost, but by the appeal of convenience, taste, and perceived prestige. A 2020 policy forum hosted by the SMERU Research Institute emphasized that effective regional responses must build on local institutions and knowledge6. When good food is already available and affordable, nutrition becomes a question of what people know about their food, and how much they value it.
That idea shaped the work that followed. Between 2021 and 2025, health cadres and community members from five villages (Kuatae, Kesetnana, Noinbila, Nonohonis and Biloto) wrote a cookbook called Hai Mnahat, which means "our food" in the Dawan language. Marlinda Nau, a local food activist known as Mama Fun, facilitated the process. She led sessions to identify local ingredients, helped cadres develop and document recipes, and ran cooking demonstrations where families could taste the results.
The book contains 70 recipes, from toddler porridges to festive dishes and snacks. It credits more than 50 people by name, including cadres, farmers from Tubuhue village and nutrition advisers from Nusa Cendana University, and it pairs the recipes with the Health Ministry's "Isi Piringku" ("My Plate") guidance. It has since become a working tool for cadres in at least five villages, who use it when preparing supplementary food at posyandu.
What matters most to me is the idea behind it. The people who cook this food every day are also best placed to say how it can nourish a child. When traditional recipes sit alongside national guidance such as "Isi Piringku", local food stops looking like a backward default and becomes a proud, modern choice for health. That is the shift in thinking we hoped for, and it is the part I would most like other programs to consider.
The work has also grown beyond one book. We initiated Haimnahat, a community learning and action initiative for local food sovereignty in Timor, and are now helping it become independent. It promotes local food and cuisine, and supports farmers and local micro-agribusinesses to build a food system rooted in their communities. It also runs a local food hub called Sentra Pangan Lokal Hai Mnahat in Noinbila Village, where people can taste and explore Timorese cooking, both traditional and contemporary, made with local ingredients.
Progress has been made, but ending stunting for good will take sustained effort and a mix of solutions. A cookbook alone will not get us there. The work also means improving sanitation, health services, household income and care during the first 1,000 days of life, the areas the national strategy targets. My argument is simple: nutrition programs can add one more element, local food knowledge, documented with the people who know it best.
Timor is not alone. Appreciation for local food is growing across Indonesia. In Flores, Maria Loretha, a farmer widely known as “Mama Sorgum” has spent more than a decade giving farmers seed and training to bring sorghum and other local grains back to village fields. In Gunungkidul, Sekolah Pagesangan, a village school founded by Diah Widuretno, helps farmers and young people turn local crops such as tubers and legumes into products they sell. In Jakarta, Helianti Hilman founded Javara, which works with farmers, fishers and food artisans to bring Indonesia’s indigenous foods to shops at home and abroad. Sepatokimin, an initiative supporting Indonesian heritage and traditional knowledge, works with community groups in several regions, including Ngada in Flores and Kasepuhan Gelaralam in Sukabumi, West Java, to document their shared food and cultural practices.
These efforts work in different ways, but they complement one another. Seed and training put local crops back in the fields. Products and markets give farmers a reason to keep growing them. Documentation keeps the knowledge of how to prepare them from being lost. Each is asking a version of the same questions. How do we document what cooks already know? How do we make local food easy and appealing to cook and eat every day? How do we make it matter to families, farmers and communities?
Connecting these efforts would help us reach a shared goal, which is to make local food part of everyday eating across Indonesia. Each of us is learning what works in our own place and context. Our cookbook is rooted in South Central Timor, and parts of it will not travel easily. Arbila beans and pisang luan, a local banana variety, may be hard to find outside Timor. The ideas behind it should travel better, and we would like to learn how they work elsewhere and what others have learned that we could use here. Part of a cuisine lives only in the kitchen and cannot be learned from a page, so it would be good for those of us doing this work to share what we are learning and, whenever we can, to share the food itself.
The problem that brought us to South Central Timor is still there, and it still needs every tool we have. I first went to help address it. Along the way I came to appreciate a food culture that is abundant and delicious, and I now think it may be one of those tools. If good food is part of the answer, then celebrating it, by this generation and the next, is part of the work.
