BANANACUE
REPUBLIC
Vol II, No. 03
Jan 19, 2005
attitudes by agnesdv
ARCHIVE:
2004
2005
Website:
Journal
Finding
Inspiration and Ideas
in a Tabo
Who says we’re a poor and impoverished people. I’ve been visiting marketplaces during their tabo the past two weekends and I saw food everywhere: fresh tropical fruits, fresh vegetables, fresh rootcrops, fresh seafoods and freshly butchered cows and carabaos and pigs and chicken. I didn’t see frozen food anywhere. Is it any wonder that the marketplace was alive with activity, that people had smiles on their faces, that everyone was smiling and greeting strangers. The noise, the colors, the movement and activity, and the strangeness of some things were making the experience doubly exciting. If we judge a town’s poverty level by the income it earns, we can say we’re really, really impoverished. If we measure that by the US standards, we’d be in hell’s bottomless pit. But if we stop measuring at all, and just experience our happiness, our experiences, then that’s tabo for you.
For those who don’t know, tabo means the
market day of a town where people and farmers and buyers come down from
their hiding places to buy or sell whatever they’ve been working on during
the weekdays. So a typical market expands during tabo because the streets
are used, and farmers spread sacks on the street to hawk their produce,
piling them and selling them not by kilos but by piles or groups.
Everything is sold subjectively, and not measured by machines. Counting is
allowed too, but who is sure to get a precise 100 when it’s fish they’re
counting? But I’m exaggerating, some do use weighing scales, and
sell food by kilos, but then if you buy 1 kilo of mangos and the analog
scale (the one that’s not digital) says 1.3, then that’s considered 1 kilo
and you pay at that price. While buying, you can even interview the
vendor, how they make the suman (for example), where they make it, what’s
it made of, what leaf they use, what’s it good to eat with... and they
have answers and smiles for you. They’d even share their life story with
you if you’re willing to sit down and listen. Tabo is all about living and
sharing your week’s work. It’s all about being around and inside something
living and breathing, and you become part of it.
What surprised me was the abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables and herbs that were being sold cheaply. I’d even say, most of them were organic and chemically unsprayed because fertilizers and insecticides are expensive for small farmers. I was in heaven, I was imagining and inventing recipes in my head. How come no one exploits the medicinal and culinary uses of these foods? How come we prefer taking biogesic to drinking warm kalamansi juice or suganda tea (oregano)? How come ginger tea is not commonly served in restaurants like in Thailand when we have an abundance of ginger? How come we’ve become a society that prefers powder to fresh, canned to fresh, bottled to fresh. How come we’ve forgotten to take care of our bodies, filling ourselves with dead food (processed, bottled, canned). Those were the questions that were running through my head as I gazed at all the freshness and liveliness and excitement of a tabo.
Because I was feeling so overwhelmed and I wasn’t really cooking for a
party but just breakfast for a friend, I ended up buying only: freshly
made tableyas (chocolate paste) to make into hot, thick Spanish chocolate.
A kilo (point 2) of fresh yellow and yummy mangoes (which I smelled first
because that’s how I know if it’s sweet or not, and if it’s forcely
ripened (carboro). And a bunch of suman (3 for P5), I bought 3 varieties
meaning they were cooked differently, used different sticky rice, and
wrapped in different kinds of leaves which curiously, tasted the same for
me. Sad to say, I am not a suman connoisseur yet. I also bought 2 kilos of
dalanghita (green oranges I call them) to make into fresh orange juice,
because they do come out orange. That was breakfast, sikwati, suman and
mangga. A typical Visayan breakfast or snack which is even served in
5-star restaurants as S-M-T in their menu (suman, mangga, tsokolate).
The next day I went to a tabo, I had the same wide-eyed curiosity for all the freshness around me. I didn’t buy anything. I just took pictures, and stared at the people and the food, imagining recipes in my head again... It is such an overwhelming experience that when you have no purpose or goal or objective at all in going there (like buying ingredients for a particular dish), it will leave you blank and senseless yet alive and excited. I did come home with lots of pictures, and ideas... that was enough.
*some photos courtesy of J.Tupa
Posted 01/20/05. Send your comment to bananacue_republic@yahoo.com
"How come we’ve forgotten to take care of our bodies, filling ourselves with dead food (processed, bottled, canned). Those were the questions that were running through my head as I gazed at all the freshness and liveliness and excitement of a tabo."
suman
mango