Indonesia’s TOXIC TOFU Timebomb: Poisoning Millions Daily

There is plastic fumigated tofu that is quietly feeding and poisoning entire cities. And I'm not being sensationalist because in this video I'm going to prove it to you. We're visiting the global epicenter of toxic tofu, Suraya.

And here we'll see village after village that have giant industries producing industrial quantities of toxified tofu. Spoiler alert, it involves burning a lot of plastic. And we're going to be following it from just the raw curd through to the final crispy fried blocks straight off the heat.

It's really good. and taking a look into the science that has been done in these areas and see why this is very likely to be a real real bad idea with some pretty serious consequences. And then finally, we'll do what we probably shouldn't and take a bite of this stuff like millions do here on the side of the streets and see just why despite knowing exactly where this comes from that people ignore it and why it's very very unlikely to change.

Let's roll. Indonesia eats a lot of tofu, but especially here in the east of Java in Suraya and the surrounding area. It is Indonesia's second largest city and you will find it everywhere.

Fried, grilled, in soups, in snacks. It is a staple. And the supply chain starts in these tofu villages that surround the city's fringes.

You sort of see smoke stacks as you walk through the village. Just these huge plumes of black smoke rising out of chimneys across the villages. thick, greasy smoke.

It swirls in the heat and it looks like the village is full of tiny coal plantations, not food factories. Guys, these factories behind me are making one of the most eaten foods here in Indonesia, tofu. Here's the core issue.

Making tofu at this scale requires a lot of heat. Massive boilers running nonstop, huge walks to deep fry the product. And to keep the costs down, they rely on whatever is cheapest.

What is this? This is coconut or no, that's the trash as well. the trash local plastic here in and around Suraya actually they have a relatively efficient plastic industry like it is used for everything and anything that does have a purpose other than burning will likely be used for that purpose.

Uh and as I've heard from the owner they use a mix here of wood coconut, which you maybe see on top of the burner. But the most reliable and consistent fuel is plastic [Music] waste. They feed these boilers and these deep fryers with it all day long.

One thing that is kind of nuts to me is just like the amount of fuel that is required to keep this tofu factory going. That boiler, I mean, it really is just like an old school steam frame. Like the thing is absolutely massive.

has two guys just rotating fulltime loading up these coconut husks and bags of plastic and it rolls all day long. And this entire village is filled with them. There are 56 factories, I believe they said, that are just filled with trash burners.

Absolutely wild. And look, I don't love to take arguments on the climate change side of things. I do think it's a little bit of a cult at this point, but let me tell you, going for those those plastic straws, I don't think it's going to make a difference, guys.

I really don't. All these factories run in a pretty similar manner. At their core is a giant boiler.

That boiler feeds steam through metal pipes across the entire space and it connects to each individual workstation. the steam the boiler ends back there and you have this one line that runs the entire length of the factory. So this factory seems to be set up very differently from any other tofu factory I have seen before.

It's sort of like each person is running their own individual station and they are going to do 90% of the steps to take the bean curd juice somebody correct me in the comments through to the complete white tofu. These workstations consist of three concrete bats. The first one is like a pure boiler.

This is where all of the tofu is going to get loaded and steamed up. They have a fresh water tub right next to it. And then a third one, which is where they're going to do most of the kind of coagulation and draining.

Let's see each step broken down. First, the soybeans are soaked and then ground into a thick paste. The paste gets dumped into a boiling bat and brought to a rapid simmer by that live steam pipe.

They're basically giant steam wands frothing up industrialsized lattes. Honestly, I can see why all these guys are shirtless. It is absolutely cooking in here just to heat the steam under this sort of asbestos roofing.

And man, I wish I could rip my shirt off right now as well. This is wild. Once it's boiled, they either scoop the milk or just straight pump it through one of these cheesecloth hammocks that are hanging above the curdling bat.

Workers then swirl it around in this circular motion, forcing the thinner liquid through the cloth while the solid stuff stays trapped. Eventually, they ring it tight, twisting it like laundry. What he has bled up right there, that's waste.

and they're left with this puck of soybean pulp. That remaining solids from the tofu is often turned into a kind of tempeh, but also apparently it's just kind of given to animals. So, it's sort of a waste product.

Yes. This is for human and then this is for the co and then the what? Oh, pig too.

Pig. Yes. But back to the tofu.

So, in these blue drums in between these sort of stations is the coagulant. We're going to pump a certain amount of that in with the the sort of strained tofu liquid. And now we wait.

The strained milk gets coagulant added. It's scooped from these large blue barrels that are placed next to each of the stations. You should now be able to see once the tofu has really started coagulating.

They're able to just skim off any of the froth that's remaining on top. And you really see quite quickly the separation of the tofu and just the water that's remaining within the coagulation drum. So, this tofu is already starting to really separate.

You can sort of see a watery surface on there, and underneath it is the sort of solidifying tofu. They remove as much water as possible, and then the curdled tofu mixture is poured into these presses that are lined with cheesecloth. They wrap it up, stack them, and they do this over and over until they have a batch of around nine molds.

The weight from each of these presses forces out the liquid which just gushes across these piled channels on the fork. You can sort of see the rotating nature of this production. This guy is scooping out the coagulated tofu into the presses and at the same time he's already preparing his next batch for boil.

So again, they really do just there's no waste of time here. It's not like they finish one batch completely and then start the next one up. As soon as one of the vats is free, it's getting utilized right away for the next batch.

one batch after the other endlessly. And the working conditions here are I mean they're intense. The floor is soaked and slippery.

There is steam everywhere. The sun just beats through the busted asbestos roofing and the air is this humid mix of soy sweat cigarette and plastic smoke. It is remarkable how much these places remind me of Dobby Gats the laundry slum in Mumbai.

I don't know what it is. I think it's like the steam, the heat, the wetness, all this moisture everywhere. Just that same kind of vibe.

Once the tofu is fully pressed, it's cut using barbecue grates as a template. And from there, it's either dumped into these brine tanks and sent off to the market where it can be sold fresh, or it's headed to the fryers. And these deep fryers are where things get even more intense.

I've kind of become numb to it. You just have this yet another giant workshop here. We have all of the tofu makers cranking along with their stations.

We have two giant trash boilers here. And then behind me, the sort of final step, the deep fryers. In each factory, there's a whole section devoted to the fry.

Rows of oversized walks bubbling away with oil. The air is just thick with smoke. There's no fuel here.

No wood. It's not gas. It is heaps of burning plastic right there fed directly to the flame.

Let me tell you guys, like you instantly know you are in one of these villages. Like there's no hiding it. It's got that that tinge.

You know that horrible smell when you start burning plastic, but just in your gut, you know it's wrong. Something's going on. You ain't supposed to be breathing this air.

That is the smell of these entire villages. The air is just thick with this black smoke and the smell of burning plastic is everywhere and it mixes with the grease and the frying oil and it kind of just sticks to your skin. And still, weirdly enough, I can kind of understand how these locals get used to it after 30 minutes or so.

It just sort of fades into the background. But the truth is is that this stuff is not harmless. A 2019 study looked into the effects of plastic fuel on Indonesia's food supply chain, and it focused on eggs laid by freerange chickens living near tofu factories.

And the results were kind of insane. These eggs had the second highest dioxin levels ever recorded in Asia. They were second only to postwar Vietnam, where the soil had been poisoned by the famous agent orange.

what they said was insecticide to kill the mosquitoes here and um so that people wouldn't get malari but it turned out to be agent orange a dioxins that same one that caused all those birth defects and cancers and just generational trauma across Vietnam that still affects the country today. Studies have linked exposure to dioxins with all kinds of health issues. Cancers, heart disease, diabetes, messed up hormones.

It is a long and really ugly list. Let's put this in perspective again. Eating just one egg from these areas would expose an adult to 70 times the European Food Safety Authorities's tolerable daily intake for dioxins.

And it doesn't stop there. The eggs are filled with other plastic derived chemicals, SECPs, PBDE, FPOS's. I don't even know what any of that stuff means.

But what I do know is I don't want it in my food. You know, I'm not going to lie. I do find there to be like at least a little bit of a contradiction in terms like these guys, they will not use Argentinian, Vietnamese, or even Indonesian soybeans because of the lack of quality.

But uh no one's really afraid of the the copious amounts of plastic that's getting into their foods. I don't know. Humans have weird norms.

As with the tofu making process, there's one person for each station. The deep frying is done by the women. The tofu arrives in those brine buckets ready to be fried.

And in the corner of every room is just a mountain of trash. This is of course the fuel. It's off cuts from the factories, unrecyclable plastics, wrappers, packaging, and it all gets scooped up by hand and fed into the burning fire beneath the oil.

The tofu is then dropped in handful by handful until it becomes just this golden brown. Eventually, it's scooped out with a strainer that is universally made of the front half of a standing fan. Guys, this is why children in Asia have no fingers.

Every front of a fan is always used for some kind of innovative thing. Usually I see them as grills, but uh tofu scoop. I love it.

And it's laid out to cool. Sorted by size, bagged, and that's pretty much it. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. And honestly, I thought that the tofu making was the rough part, but this is even more unbearable.

The heat next to each of these deep frying burners just hits you like a punch. And the whole room reeks of melted plastic. It is humid as hell.

And these women, they're grinding. That is hard hard work. Okay, I'm getting told I should try one of these.

And so this is like this big, I don't know, square piece of tofu. Maybe it's a little bit different from these sort of longer pieces. It's less warm.

It has almost like a a donut- like texture. I think we're really getting in the way here. It's just really good.

It has kind of like this crunchy outside that almost rubbery like skin and then this fluffy interior. Again, I don't know why there's so many tofu haters out there. To me, that is every bit as good as like a fried doughut, but with a lot more protein packed within it.

You don't get any of the kind of more dodgy smells from this area. I think anybody would like that. I'm interested in seeing how they really prepare from here because I think this is the base of like a pretty tremendous Indonesian dish.

And incredibly, from everything that I've found, no one's ever really tested the tofu itself, which is just kind of wild to me. I mean, I'm not an expert, guys. I'm eating too much of this at this point, but I'm telling you, at least here, maybe I'm just used to the smell.

up straight off the heat. It's really good. But if tofu is being deep fried directly over open plastic flames with no filtration, that feels like a pretty direct route for contamination.

More so than just some chicken to be walking around nearby. And the scale of it to me is also what's most shocking. In just 2 days, I visited maybe 30 tofu factories.

And whilst some did use wood for the initial boilers, mister, no plastic. No, no, no. That was a rarity.

And every single one deep fried their tofu over burnt plastic flames. Just open fires, pumping out black smoke right into the workspace and into the tofu. And I think it's pretty safe to assume that this is how all tofu and deep fried tofu is being made in and around the surayan area.

I've got to admit, like you can't taste the plastic until you get out of the factory. It's so weird. You know what I mean?

Like there's so much of it in there that it's just like takes over your sense of smell. And it's the second biggest city in Indonesia. It's home to more than 3 million people in the city itself and more than 10 in the surrounding area.

It's not just some fringe operation. It's feeding a massive population with one of its staple foods. I'm not saying that we're looking at another Agent Orange situation here.

They've been cooking and eating this stuff this way for a good 20 years by now. And I think that some of the more shocking health effects would have come to light. They're all coming from villages like we shot today.

Yes. So, uh maybe not only that village, but there is several village near Java. There's some village that produce tofu.

So I mean the problem obviously is like the plastic. Do you think anybody here cares about the plastic in this? No one care.

We just eat this because uh we never uh are just thinking that nobody see how the their food come from. They do not see how they produce it. So they don't care.

But do you think they would care if they did know if they did see it? Maybe. Maybe.

But maybe. But just maybe just a little person because uh I just thinking that if they replace the tofu using the fuel using other things the price of tofu become more expensive and then I just thinking people prefer to buy something that is cheaper. So maybe Yeah.

Right. But what about you? Do you care?

I mean you saw it being made today. I think because I'm not eating this tofu every day. So, it's okay for me just once and then I'm not dying because of that.

Right. Right. Yeah.

I mean, me too. I suppose it's weird like you see it today, you smell it, but when it comes to a dish like this, it's just covered in other places cuz I don't care. You stop worrying.

Right. But I do think that it's likely there is something far more insidious underneath the surface here. And I think that somebody needs to start paying attention because if this tofu is even half as contaminated as those eggs, then there's a problem that's a lot bigger than just one village.

What do you think about the pollution? Do you think it's a a serious problem or not a problem? [Music] Sure.

Yeah. Yeah. We sure that that's a serious problem that there there there will be a a serious health impact because you know like this region this city this city was named as the most pollution city in Indonesia.

The most polluted city in Indonesia. City in Indonesia. Wow.

Oddly after being there I actually kind of get where these tofu makers are coming from. A lot of these guys want to stop using plastic. But there's zero demand from consumers in Suraya for a cleaner product.

And from the producers side, there is a lot of different between the plastic and the coconut. Like the plastic they can came can came can every day frequently like you know we just celebrate our Yeah. Yeah.

At our at Ramadan Ramadan and the the price of coconut just become high in price very very high. What about wood? Is wood how much is wood compared to plastic?

Wood is the same thing as coconut. They just can they they just cannot came frequently because of like you know the stock of the wood. It's not as much as plastic as much as plastic.

It's it's just not as uh reliable even. Yeah. So So even if you guys had better boilers or more efficient boilers, it might still be a problem because you might not get the supply frequently enough.

Yeah. Because like you know we use plastic every day and we consume it like a whole day and the next day we need that again. Yeah.

And if we don't use that we what we what we will do. Yeah. Like you know Yeah.

We kind of just make wood like they just can every day or something like that. And so the system kind of traps them. Change means risk and no one wants to be first.

We don't have any solutions. We don't have any solution. We can't we can't do nothing, right?

We can't do nothing because of that. The government just gave us the warning but they they don't give us a solutions and they don't have any regulations to you know make everything clear. It's not just about the price.

It's not that these guys love burning trash. It's that right now that's the only way they can stay alive. It doesn't seem like an unfixable problem to me.

Some of the factories that use dedicated wood burners told me that they are actually more efficient than plastic burners. They just require more capital upfront to construct. Loans could help here.

So, it's interesting guys. There is that one factory that uses wood. I've got to admit by comparison like pretty professional.

A lot was just telling me that they were saying like they have the far more efficient sort of maybe slightly more modern boilers and therefore like it's actually more cost efficient for them to use wood just more of a capital outlay up front. And you can see it right away like their smoke stack it just has absolutely no smoke, no black bellowing clouds above it. And while I'm not a huge fan of subsidies, I'm less of a fan of just poisoning giant populations of people.

So, if alternative fuels are just simply not cheap enough, then surely there's a way to subsidize a fuel for these deep fryers like gas. I'm just spitballing here, but these guys, they want to change. They just don't know what to do.

And if you ask me, change, it's kind of necessary. All right, guys. One more of these crazy sort of fish shrimp pasted tofus.

I'm telling you, a lot easier than wum mam if you're Vietnamese. the stuff goes down a little bit easier. But that secret ingredient, that plastic, I'm telling you, you just straight forget about it.

This is really good. That's That's quality tofu. Suraya, keep doing your thing.

Maybe the best toxic tofu on earth.