Matter of Taste - An insight of the Filipino Culture in the eyes
and taste of British Journalist Mathew Sutherland
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 full y discernable 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 fish balls, 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 fish 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
with 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 50pounds 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. Iam 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 to four are); and the ubiquitous,
stinky shrimp paste, BAGOONG, and it's equally stinky sister, PATIS.
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 ube 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. 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" (chicken's feet); "KURBATA" (either
just chicken's neck, or "neck and thigh" as in "neck-tie");
"WALKMAN" (pigs ears); "PAL"(chicken wings); "HELMET"
(chicken head);"IUD" (chicken intestines), and BETAMAX"
(video-cassette-like blocks of animal blood). Yum yum. Bon appetit.
"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches" --
(Proverbs 22:1) When I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six
years ago, one of the first cultural differences to strike me was
names. The subject has
provided a continuing source of amazement and amusement ever since.
The first unusual thing, from
an English perspective, is that everyone here has nickname. In the
staid and boring United Kingdom, we
have nicknames in kindergarten, but when we move into adulthood we
tend, I am glad to say, to lose them.
The second thing that struck me is that Philippine names for both
girls and boys tend to be what we in
the UK would regard as overbearingly cutesy for anyone over about
five. Fifty-five-year-olds colleague put
it. Where I come from, a boy with a nickname like Boy Blue or Honey
Boy would be beaten to death at school
by pre-adolescent bullies, and never make it to adulthood. So, probably,
would girls with names like
Babes, Lovely, Precious, Peachy or Apples. Yuk, ech ech. Here, however,
no one bats an eyelid.
Then I noticed how many people have what I have come to call "door-bell
names". These are nicknames that
sound like -well, door-bells. There are millions of them. Bing, Bong,
Ding, and Dong are some of the more
common. They can be, and frequently are, used in even more door-bell-like
combinations such as Bing-Bong,
Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting, and so on. Even one of our current Senator and
Presidential Candidate has a
doorbell named Ping. None of these door-bell names exist where I come
from, and hence sound unusually
amusing to my untutored foreign ear. Someone once told me that one
of the Bings, when asked why he was
called Bing, replied "because my brother is called Bong".
Faultless logic. Dong, of course, is a
particularly funny one for me, as where I come from "dong"
is a slang word of well, perhaps "talong" is
the best Tagalog equivalent.
Repeating names was another novelty to me, having never before encountered
people with names like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or Ning-Ning. The
secretary I inherited on my arrival had an unusual one: Leck-Leck.
Such names are then frequently further refined by using the "squared"
symbol, as in Len2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a while.
Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a theme when namintheir
children. This can be as simple as making them all begin with the
same letter, as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy. More imaginative parents
shoot for more sophisticated forms of assonance or rhyme, as in Biboy,
Boboy, Buboy, Baboy (notice the
names get worse the more kids there are-best to be born early or you
could end up being a Baboy).
Even better, parents can create whole families of, say, desserts (Apple
Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie) or flowers (Rose, Daffodil, Tulip). The
main advantage of such combinations is that they look great painted
across your trunk if you're a cab driver. That's another thing I'd
never seen before coming to Manila -- taxis with the driver's kids'
names on the trunk. Another whole eye-opening field for the foreign
visitor is the phenomenon of the "composite" name. This
includes names like Jejomar (for Jesus, Joseph and Mary), and the
remarkable Luzviminda (for Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, believe it
or not). That's a bit like me being called something like "Engscowani"
(for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). Between you and
me, I'm glad I'm not.
And how could I forget to mention the fabulous concept of the randomly
inserted letter 'h'. Quite what this device is supposed to achieve,
I have not yet figured out, but I think it is designed to give a touch
of class to an otherwise only averagely weird name. It results in
creations like Jhun, Lhenn, Ghemma, and Jhimmy. Or how about Jhun-Jhun
(Jhun2)? How boring to come from a country like the UK full of people
with names like John Smith. How wonderful to come from a country where
imagination and exoticism rule the world of names.
Even the towns here have weird names; my favorite is the unbelieveably-named
town of Sexmoan (ironically
close to Olongapo and Angeles). Where else in the world could that
really be true?
Where else in the world could the head of the Church really be called
Cardinal Sin? Where else but the Philippines! Note: Philippines has
a senator named Joker, and it is his legal name.
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About The Author
Mathew Sutherland - British Journalist Stationed in Philippines
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