Food for Thought

One of the earliest memories I have is walking up to the front of Nana's house, with the smell of home cooked ube halaya wafting through her screen door. Nana greets me at the door, spatula in hand, telling me to tikim or taste her fresh batch of ube made especially for me. Who would say no to that?!

Nana's house still stands in a barangay or barrio called Balut in the Philippines. For a small town, it has a name with a big reputation. "Balut" loosely translated means "wrapped" but its more commonly known translation refers to a popular street-food in the Philippines, which is a fertilized duck (or chicken) egg with a nearly-developed embryo inside, boiled and eaten in the shell. Yes, I used to eat balut. No, I don't eat it anymore.

Ube and balut are just two of the many Filipino staples that bring back memories. Now that I think about it, they're somewhat representative of the majority of Filipino cuisine: sweets and meats. With meats out of the picture for me as a vegetarian, I think I might hold sweets on a whole new level nowadays. I no longer have access to traditional, hand-mashed and hand-stirred ube but I can still find its processed cousin at Fil-Am franchise markets like Red Ribbon, Jollibee, etc. And just like how I have bitter sweet feelings about the intersection of childhood memories and realizing how many years old I gradually turn, I have bitter sweet feelings about the intersections of Filipino food and American culture.

There's a part of me that's excited about the blossoming modern takes on Filipino food (especially in the vegetarian arena) but I also can't help looking back in true old fart fashion to the "good ol' days" of real Filipino food, whatever that means. This is where I get into the grey area of what real Filipino food even is... which reminds me of the more general question, "What makes something authentically Filipino?" Filipino food is in itself an intersection of the many cultures within the Philippines; a yummy manifestation of the political clumping together of the many islands after colonization... my Nana herself was part Spanish, so does her ube halaya not count as Filipino food to begin with?

As I muse about the many aspects of Filipino food (remembering memories attached to old dishes and taking in the emerging new versions), my brain takes me not only on a ride through food memory lane but also on a surprise journey to wrack my brain about ancestry and authenticity. Definitely food for thought.