Reflections from Ant Hill
One of those funny filipino email forwards.
The following is from a British journalist stationed in the
Philippines.
His observations are so hilarious!!! ! This was written in 1999.
Matter of Taste
By Matthew 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
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 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, merienda cena,
dinner, bedtime snacks 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
the same without gambas or beef tapa. Third, no one ventures more than
two paces from their house without baon (food in small container) 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
to beat the sheer wanton, cholesterolic frenzy of a good old-fashioned
LECHON de leche (roast pig) 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
NUMBER FIVE" (I dread to think what numbers one through four are);
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 purple ice cream. I have never
been able to get my brain around eating purple 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. 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 a 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, doorbells. 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 our newly appointed chief of police has a doorbell
name Ping. None of these doorbell 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 for 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 naming
their 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 unbelievably
Where else in the world could that really be true?
Where else in the world could the head of the Church really be called
Where else but the Philippines!
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Matter of Taste; Filipino Food Culture
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