Mocktails for a fresh and healthy fast:
Amid the saccharine snacks typically consumed here to break fast is Ida Leman’s mocktail stand. Labeled “Fresh and Healthy” the juice is made from papaya, mango and passion fruit. One kilogram of sugar is spread throughout the batch, which produces roughly 200 glasses of the bright pink beverage. It looks neither fresh nor healthy.
“No alcohol,” Ida says in broken English. “It’s a Muslim cocktail,” she cackles.
Her stand is one of dozens set up along this busy market street in Central Jakarta. Each year during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan vendors set up in the shade of a giant white tent, the kind used for weddings and special events. They hawk their sweet treats until just after the sunset, when commuters stop to break their daylong fast with a drink of coconut milk, palm sugar and bananas or sweet potatoes.
Down the road Jokowi sells sop buah, literally fruit soup. Though it’s filled with syrup, or in some cases, a hearty helping of condensed milk. Indonesia’s economy has been growing at record speeds, drawing attention from international investors eager to take advantage of a population of 240 million consumers.
That spending power has been on display throughout Ramadan. In the day time shops are abuzz with women taking advantage of holiday sales. In the evenings restaurants are full. The head of Indonesia’s investment board said reservations were unheard of among Indonesians until just recently. Now you can’t get into many restaurants without one.
Ida, like many enterprising entrepreneurs, is taking advantage of growing demand for Muslim-friendly fashions. Dressed in a lime green frock with day-glow pink swirls and a matching headscarf, the rotund, middle age woman says she designs Muslim clothing.
Jokowi also has another job, selling meatball soup, when he’s not hawking fast-breaking goodies. Three generations of his family sell their sop buah from the bed of a pickup truck. They’ve been doing it for the past four years, but despite the uptick in consumer spending power, Jokowi says sales are “the same as ever.”
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