Mortar & Pestle

Lesung & Batu

This week we have to elaborate the 3 function of

 Lesung and Batu based on the selected 3 words from the picture above.

I choose diet, medical , and married

-diet-

Having a mortar and pestle in your home will encourage you to get more spices in your diet. In general, spices are good for your overall health and are full of nutrition, including vitamins and minerals. Thus having a mortar and pestle in your home may improve the quality of your diet.

Having a mortar and pestle in your kitchen will definitely encourage you to grind up more fresh spices. If you have ever cooked with freshly ground spices, then you know just how much better food can taste when freshly ground spices have been added in. Moreover, spices have a tendency to naturally lose some of their taste when they have been processed. Yet, when you ground them freshly yourself, this is simply not an issue. If you like the way your food tastes then you are more likely to cook more nutritious food on a consistent basis.

-medical-

Mortars and pestles were traditionally used in pharmacies to crush various ingredients prior to preparing an extemporaneous prescription. The mortar and pestle, along with the Rod of Asclepius, the Green Cross, and others, is one of the most pervasive symbols of pharmacology. For pharmaceutical use, the mortar and the head of the pestle are usually made of porcelain, while the handle of the pestle is made of wood. This is known as a Wedgwood mortar and pestle and originated in 1779. Today the act of mixing ingredients or reducing the particle size is known as trituration. Mortars and pestles are also used as drug paraphernalia to grind up pills to speed up absorption when they are ingested, or in preparation forinsufflation.

-marriage-

Married men settle into helping their wives produce sago for food. It’s hard work: preparing the field, cutting the trees open, scraping out the insides and washing the pith thoroughly — then pounding it into flour to be boiled. The work is loosely gender-assigned, with the wives doing the washing and scraping after weaving containers out of palm fronds. At one point the material has to be pounded hard a long time in a sort of mortar-and-pestle way that certainly suggests coition. Married couples share this task. The harder men work, the more the young men stop tending their hair, maybe even discard their penis-gourds. But they are nevertheless growing wiser and more clever in the talk among the men while the bachelors who haven’t mastered hunting yet are dependent on the married couples for the basic sago. No one denies anyone sago. Just protein.