KINABUKASAN SOCIETY

Towards Unity and Service

A Matter of Taste

      By Matthew Sutherland
(same guy who wrote A Rhose, by Any Other Name)

"A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than  he does of
his dinner." --  Samuel Johnson

I have now been in this country for over six years, and consider myself in
most respects well-assimilated.  However, there is one key step on the road
to full  assimilation which I have yet to take, and that's to eat balut. The
day any of you sees  me eating balut, please call immigration and ask them
to issue me a Filipino passport. Because at that point there will be no
turning back.

Balut, for those still blissfully ignorant non-Pinoys out there, is a
fertilized duck egg. It is  commonly sold with salt in a piece of newspaper,
much like English fish and chips, by street vendors-usually after dark,
presumably so you can't see how gross it   is. It's meant to be an
aphrodisiac, although I can't imagine anything more likely to dispel sexual
desire than crunching on a partially-formed baby duck swimming in noxious
fluid.  The embryo in the egg comes in varying stages of development, but
basically it is not considered macho to eat one without fully discernible
feathers, beak, and claws. Some  say these crunchy bits are the best. Others
prefer just to drink the so-called 'soup', the vile, pungent liquid that
surrounds the aforementioned feathery fetus... excuse me, I  have to go and

throw up now. I'll be back in a minute.

Food dominates the life of the Filipino. People here just love to eat.
They eat at least  eight times a day. These eight official meals are called,
in order: breakfast, snacks, lunch, merienda, pica-pica, pulutan, dinner,
and no-one-saw-me-take-that-cookie- from-the-fridge-so-it-doesn't-count. The
short gaps in between these mealtimes are  spent eating Sky Flakes from the
open packet that sits on every desktop. You're never  far from food in the
Philippines. If you doubt this, next time you're driving home from work, try
this game. See how long you can drive without seeing food-and I don't
mean a distant restaurant, or a picture of food. I mean a man on the
sidewalk frying fishballs, or a man walking through the traffic selling nuts
or candy. I bet it's  less than one minute.

Here are some other things I've noticed about food in the Philippines.
Firstly, a meal is  not a meal without rice-even breakfast. In the UK, I
could go a whole year without eating rice.  Second, it's impossible to drink
without eating. A bottle of San  Miguel just isn't the same without gambas
or beef tapa.  Third, no one ventures more than two paces from their house
without baon and a container of something cold to  drink. You might as well

ask a Filipino to leave home without his pants on.  And lastly, where I come
from, you eat with a knife and fork. Here, you eat with a spoon  and fork.
You try eating rice swimming in sauce with a knife.

One really nice thing about Filipino food culture is that people always
ask you to share  their food. In my office, if you catch anyone attacking
their baon, they will always go:  "Sir! Kain tayo!" ("Let's eat!"). This
confused me, until I realized that they didn't actually expect me to sit
down and start munching on their boneless bangus. In  fact, the polite
response is something like, "No thanks, I just ate." But the principle is
sound-if you have food on your plate, you are expected to share it,
however hungry you are, with those  who may be even hungrier. I think
that's great. In fact, this  is frequently even taken one step further. Many
Filipinos use "Have you eaten yet?"  ("Kumain ka na?") as a general
greeting, irrespective of time of day  or location.

Some foreigners think Filipino food is fairly dull compared to other Asian
cuisines.  Actually lots of it is very good: spicy dishes like Bicol Express
(strange, a dish named  after a train);  anything cooked in coconut milk;
anything kinilaw; and anything adobo.  And it's hard to beat the sheer
wanton, cholesterholic frenzy of a good old-fashioned  lechon de leche
feast. Dig a pit, light a fire, add 50 pounds of animal fat on a stick, and

cook until crisp. Mmm, mmm... you can actually feel your arteries
constricting with each successive mouthful.  I also share one key Pinoy
trait-a sweet tooth. I am thus the only foreigner I know who does not
complain about sweet bread, sweet burgers, sweet spaghetti, sweet banana
ketchup, and so on. I am a man who  likes to put jam on his pizza. Try it!

It's the weird food you want to avoid. In addition to duck fetus in the
half-shell, items to  avoid in the Philippines include pig's blood soup
(dinuguan); bull's testicle soup (the strangely-named "soup number five" - I
dread to think what numbers one through four  are); and the ubiquitous,
stinky shrimp paste, bagoong, and its equally stinky sister, patis (fish
sauce).  Filipinos are so addicted to these latter items that they will even
risk arrest or  deportation trying to smuggle them into countries like
Australia and the USA, which  wisely ban the importation of items you can
smell from more than 100 paces. Then there's the small matter of the blue
ice cream. I have never been able to get my brain around eating blue food;
the ubiquitous ube leaves me cold. And lastly on the subject of weird food,

beware:  that kalderetang kambing (goat) could well be kalderetang aso (dog)...

The Filipino, of course, has a well-developed sense of food humor. Here's

a typical  Pinoy food joke: "I'm on a seafood diet."  "What's a seafood
diet?" " When I see food, I   eat it!"  Filipinos also eat strange bits of
animals-the feet, the head, the guts, etc., usually barbecued on a stick.
These have been given witty names, like "Adidas"  (chickens' feet);
"kurbata" (either just chicken's neck, or "neck and thigh" as in
"neck-tie");  "Walkman" (pigs ears); "PAL" (chicken wings); "helmet"
(chicken heads);  "IUD" (chicken intestines), and "Betamax"
(video-cassette-like blocks of animal blood).  Yum, yum.  Bon appetit.



Contributed by: Romeo Cruz

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