Inasua: The Taste of a Homeland

The journey toward TNS begins long before the islands appear. From the air, Maluku is nearly three hours away. Another journey follows, from Tulehu Port across roughly two hours of open sea to Amahai on Seram Island. The wind changes. The water stretches toward the horizon.

For generations, this sea was not simply a geographical barrier. It was a road. People sailed between islands carrying cloves and nutmeg. Their produce travelled to Banda Naira and Ambon, while sailing boats carried spices toward Java. A single journey could take about a week. Long before refrigeration, communities travelling through these waters needed another kind of technology. They needed food that could survive the journey. This is where inasua becomes more than cuisine. Fish such as babi fish, mackerel, or snapper are salted and preserved for long periods. Under certain conditions, inasua can last for more than a year. For people travelling by boat across unpredictable waters, preservation was not a culinary luxury. It was a necessity. Inasua allowed the sea to remain a place of movement without making food security impossible. The technique transformed a perishable resource into something that could accompany people across distance and time.

In that sense, fermentation became part of the community's maritime technology. Over time, however, that technology also became culture.

Herdion Marantika, whom I came to know as Dion, is a young community figure from TNS. Whenever he talks about the islands, he sometimes pauses.His story is unusual because he did not experience the event that changed the lives of his people. He was born long after his ancestors were displaced, yet he grew up with the memory. It came through his parents and relatives, through stories repeated across generations about houses that were abandoned, gardens left behind, and a sea that once sat at the centre of everyday life.

"We are like people who were moved," Dion told me, "but our hearts never moved with us."

That sentence stayed with me. There may be no better way to understand the role of inasua. People were moved, but food remained. Through it, something of the islands continued to travel with them. For Dion, Teon, Nila, and Serua are more than names on a map. They are an inheritance. He knows the islands through stories, through family, through journeys back to ancestral gardens, and through tastes that connect him to a place he never experienced in the same way as his grandparents. Inasua is part of that inheritance.

For generations, the people of TNS lived alongside an active volcanic landscape. Earthquakes were familiar, and so was Mount Lawarkawra. The volcano posed a constant threat, yet the land around it sustained life. Its volcanic soils supported crops, fruits, nutmeg, cloves, and other agricultural products, making the islands productive landscapes connected to a wider maritime economy. Then, in 1978, the government relocation programme began. Nicolas Leunura, a former king in the TNS community, remembers the departure.

"We were taken from there," he recalled. "The people were escorted by the navy, by the marines. We prepared whatever belongings we could carry. Our livestock, our gardens, we had to leave them behind." He paused before describing what it felt like to leave.

"We worked while crying. We were leaving the place where our blood had been shed. Indonesia is our homeland. But the place where my blood was spilled was here."

The people were relocated to Makariki on the southern coast of Seram Island. They lived in basic barracks under difficult conditions. The days were hot, the nights were cold, sanitation was poor, and disease spread throughout the settlement. More than 200 people died. The relocation may have removed people from the immediate threat of volcanic activity, but it also separated the community from the landscape that had shaped its life. The gardens were gone. The familiar fishing grounds were far away. The relationship between people and place had been violently interrupted. Yet, it was not erased.

People continued to return to their ancestral islands, harvesting from gardens and fishing in waters they had known for generations. The journey back was partly economic. It was also an act of remembering.

This is where the story of inasua becomes particularly important. If the sea was a place of production and movement, the kitchen became a place where knowledge could survive. Women have always been central to that process.

They know how the fish should be selected, prepared, salted, stored, handled, and, perhaps most importantly, how to recognise when it is ready. This is the kind of knowledge that rarely appears in written records. It lives in the hands, in memory, and is passed from one generation to the next through watching, doing, tasting, correcting, and repeating. Inasua therefore offers a different way of thinking about gastronomy.

Gastronomy is often associated with chefs, restaurants, recipes, ingredients, and presentation. Inasua, however, reminds us that gastronomy can begin somewhere much older, with a community learning how to survive, with people understanding what the sea provides, with women transforming a perishable catch into something that lasts, and with knowledge accumulated over generations.
The recipe is only the visible part. Behind it lies a worldview.

Even the name carries geography. On Teon, it is known as ina manna. On Serua, ina skua. On Nila, it remains inasua. Different names, different islands, a shared culinary lineage.

The variations remind us that food is rarely static. It moves with people, adapts to local circumstances, and changes subtly from one community to another, while continuing to provide a common language. Inasua is part of everyday life. It appears at traditional gatherings, is served during religious celebrations, including Christmas, and also provides an important source of income for many families. What began as a means of preservation has become a marker of identity. That transformation is what makes it gastronomically significant.

Inasua is not valuable because it is unusual. It is valuable because it remains deeply embedded in a living culture.

I think about this whenever Dion talks about home. He was born away from the islands. His generation inherited a homeland through stories rather than direct experience.

Yet, taste offers another kind of map. A flavour can connect someone to a grandmother. A familiar preparation can remind a family of an island, and a single dish can preserve a relationship with a landscape long after someone has moved away from it. In that sense, inasua becomes a kind of edible geography. It maps the sea, migration, memory, and resilience. The ingredients come from the sea. The technique comes from generations of knowledge. Preservation makes movement possible. And sharing the meal brings people together again.

The story does not end with food. The future of inasua depends on the future of the sea that provides its ingredients. Today, communities in TNS are strengthening their role in managing fishing grounds and protecting marine resources. Traditional practices such as sasi are also being reinforced as part of this effort.

The principle is simple. Resources cannot be treated as limitless if they are expected to sustain future generations. This is where gastronomy meets conservation. A dish on the table can conceal an entire ecological system. Behind a piece of fermented fish lies a fishing ground. Behind the fishing ground are reefs, shorelines, currents, seasons, and weather. Behind those ecosystems are the people whose lives depend on what the sea continues to provide. If the sea changes, the food changes. If the fish disappear, the recipe cannot survive in the same form. Protecting food heritage therefore also means protecting the landscape that makes that food possible.

On April 12, 2026, the people of TNS gathered for the Kor'a Inasua Festival. It was a celebration of food, but it was also a celebration of identity.

Inasua was not simply served. It was explained, remembered, shared, and placed before a younger generation increasingly negotiating what it means to inherit a culture while living in a changing world. That may be one of the most important things a food festival can do. Not turn traditional food into a museum object, but allow it to live, to be eaten, discussed, questioned, adapted, and perhaps become an economic opportunity for the people who carry the knowledge. The challenge is to ensure that the people behind the food remain at the centre of its future.

There is a temptation, when talking about indigenous food, to describe it as traditional, authentic, or exotic. Yet, those words can make living food cultures seem as though they belong to the past.

Inasua is not a relic. It is still being made, eaten, taught, and adapted. That is precisely what makes it so compelling. Its story is not about preserving a recipe exactly as it was. It is about preserving the knowledge and relationships that give the recipe meaning.
The people of TNS were displaced from their islands. They carried knowledge with them, along with memories, tastes, and ways of understanding the sea. Some of those things continue to find their way back to the islands. Perhaps…that is why inasua feels like more than food. It is a quiet form of return.

By the end of my journey, I found myself returning to the same question. What happens when a people can no longer live in the place they call home?

Perhaps they carry it with them…in stories, in journeys, in the gardens they continue to visit, in the sea, in sasi, in the hands of women, and in a piece of fish transformed by salt and time. Inasua is salty. Fermented. Patient. It survives because someone knows how to make it, and because someone else is willing to learn.

That may be its most important ingredient. Not the fish. Not the salt. Not even time. Continuity.
People were moved, but their roots were not. Somewhere between the sea and the kitchen, between the island they left and the place they live today, a taste continues to carry them home.