My name is Nicole Ponseca and I'm a restaurateur, an author and hospitality consultant, and I'm the founder of two groundbreaking Filipino restaurants named Jeepney and Maharlika in New York City that pushed the national conversation around Filipino food.
Read MoreLuisa Brimble is a multifaceted storyteller who's based in Sydney, Australia, and her professional work ranges from photography to writing and cooking.
Read MoreI'm Mia P. Manansala. I use she, her pronouns, and I am the author of the Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery Series. And I'm based in Chicago.
Read MoreIt's hard to believe I started the podcast eight years ago. Several jobs have passed since and I've gone on all kinds of adventures, including a really epic one across the Philippines, that I started and put on hold for now.
Read MoreIt always amazes how as soon as I get back to the Philippines, I just slip back into talking the exact same way I did when I was 19.
Read MoreI first learned about Regee and her book, called “Coconut Kitchen: Appetizers and Main Dishes”, through the Culinary Historians of the Philippines.
Read MoreJune’s been kinda crazy. Besides being the first ever Filipino Heritage Month across Canada - huge in itself - I came back from a one week media workshop with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, in London.
Read MoreThis episode we’re diving into a book called “No Forks Given” by Yana Gilbuena. It’s a collection of 50 recipes from her 50 US state tour from 2014 to 2015.
Read MoreThe point of having pulutan, for me, is that it’s an integral part of the “inuman” or overall drinking session. The thing that keeps people fed and, by extension, the party pretty much going.
Read MoreHard to believe it’s been two years since I started the podcast. While it still feels very indie, and there’s a lot I’d like to improve, what really keeps me going is the excitement with everything I wanna share with you all.
Read MoreI’m Charlene Tan of Good Food Community. It’s a social enterprise that runs a community shared agriculture program.
Read MoreI’m Alexandra Cuerdo. I’m the director and filmmaker behind “Ulam: Main Dish”, which is a labour of love and a feature documentary on Filipino food crossing over to the mainstream, in both L.A. and New York.
Read MoreThis episode, we’re talking with Marie Cavosora, who leads a team of dairy entrepreneurs in the Philippines, and who founded a company called Calaboo Dairy.
Read MoreToday we’re talking with Clang Garcia, who published a book called “Food Holidays Philippines”. We’re gonna be talking about food tourism this episode and I’m literally bouncing in place here. It’s about two of the great things I love - travel and food!
Read MoreToday we’re talking with Cherrie Atilano, a young Filipina farmer who started a social enterprise called AGREA - “AGREA” being a combination of the words “agriculture” and “gaea”, for earth.
Read MoreOur guest today is Rene Alexander Orquiza, a professor based in Rhode Island whose research and teaching interests focus on 20th century American history, Philippine-American history, and immigration history.
Read MoreThis episode, we’re going to the province of Cebu, in the central Visayas region of the Philippines, to talk about a much-beloved way of cooking with Louella Alix - author of a book called “Hikay: The Culinary Heritage of Cebu”.
Read MoreFind the transcript of my interview with Bryan Koh below.
INTRO
Welcome to Exploring Filipino Kitchens. I’m your host, Nastasha Alli.
Today we’re talking with Bryan Koh, author of the book “Milk Pigs and Violet Gold,” a hardcover book from a Philippine university press, first published in 2013 and then re-issued three years later to the rest of Southeast Asia.
The illustrations, artwork and photos in Bryan’s books are BEAUTIFUL. I got to say that off the top. Turning the pages, I’m driven by the narrative, the structure, and the immediacy of his stories – like I feel like I’m there – and I constantly think, because I’m reading the recipes… I mean, “really, that’s all it takes to make that?”
But of course, it’s never just that! It isn’t just gathering ingredients in a bowl, and not even just knowing the right technique – whether you’re making handmade noodles or one of the dozens of kakanin, or rice cakes – that are in the book. What I really love about Milk Pigs is that there’s the sense of discovery, of excitement, like how the food he talks about sounds totally familiar, but at the same time, also really new.
Come along with us for this month’s adventures in Philippine cookery.
INTERVIEW
BK: My name’s Bryan Koh. I’m a food writer. I’m based in Singapore. I’ve written two books so far, well of course, there’s ‘Milk Pigs,’ and ‘Milkier Pigs’...
NA: That’s ‘Milk Pigs and Violet Gold,’ his ode Philippine cuisine, and its second edition, playfully titled ‘Milkier Pigs and Violet Gold,’ with a few more recipes, extended chapters, and a new layout…
BK: And there’s another one called ‘0451 Mornings Are For Mont Hin Gar,’ and that one is a book on Burmese food.
NA: Bryan completed his bachelors in mathematics at the University of Singapore, then went on to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York for his masters degree. After deciding that life as an academic wasn’t necessarily for him, Bryan went back to school for hospitality.
BK: And right now, when I’m not writing, I’m running a bakery in Singapore called ‘Chalk Farm.’
NA: So how did his book ‘Milk Pigs and Violet Gold’ come about, I asked?
02:46 How the book started
BK: Well, it kind of happened during the interim between my university days and my master’s program. I did a couple of things, Chalk Farm was one of them, that’s why I started it. What else I did? I was a freelance journalist. It was quite interesting because during that time, I’m a bit of a food book junkie, so I did collect quite a bit. I was reading excessively, and I realized there weren’t very many food books – Asian food books, I should qualify – that had this kind of narrative to them. Most of the books you get here anyway, usually are like an instruction manual, or it’s almost encyclopedic.
NA: That is totally true. Every time I go back to Southeast Asia, I always stop into as many bookstores as possible, to check out what kinds of cookbooks they have, and that I can add to my collection. There are definitely some notable books, but for the most part – as Bryan says – this stuff is pretty dry; it can be boring. Informative, but not like the long, winding travelogues of writers like Alan Davidson, who lived in Laos in the 1950s, or even Fuchsia Dunlop, whose memoir about Sichuan food is easily one of my favorites.
BK: So I was trying to have a book that engaged the reader in a really different way. Something I was looking for, from a very personal standpoint. So that’s how it happened. For some reason I thought back then to do Philippine cuisine because it was actually – back then anyway, this was nearly 10 years ago – there wasn’t really much literature about it. There is more now. There’s much more now, but back then that really wasn’t the case, it wasn’t this “hot” subject that it is now. Now we have so many articles, so many bloggers, so many food magazines talking about it as the next big Asian cuisine.
NA: So all this excitement surrounding Filipino food, it isn’t just tipping over in North America and the West, it’s happening in the actual region it’s from. With so much more publicity given to Philippine ingredients and flavor profiles, restaurants in the city that host visiting chefs from Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Spain, Filipino food is legitimately a hot commodity.
05:31 Why write about Philippine cuisine?
BK: The reason why that cuisine floated into my head to begin with was that I had a yaya, she was from La Union and she cooked exceedingly well. I realized very much later on that quite a few people didn't really has that similarly good experience as with Philippine cuisine, and that quite a few of my friends had pretty horrific ones. As I went along, I began telling people what I was doing. I got quite a few raised eyebrows. That didn't really discourage me. If anything, I think it kind of it fortified my stand that I really have to do this.
BK: Around 2009, I was briefly sent on a freelance assignment to the Philippines. This was my first time on Philippine soil. It was in Lipa, Batangas and it was ironic because it was a detox facility that I went to. After my writing stint, I was taken around to eat, and it was an amazing experience. Until then, there were a lot of things I hadn’t know about, and to me that entire trip was an eye-opener. That’s when I kind of realized that this was something I really wanted to do. The very seed was sown during that trip.
07:04 Getting by with a little help from friends
BK: Later that year, I went to Cornell where I did my masters and I met two wonderful friends, Bianca and Susanne. They were the ones who actually encouraged me and provided the network for the book to happen. I made it quite plain in the preface of the book that without their assistance, this would have not come to fruition.
NA: And this is an important thing to note; something Bryan and I, and many other people I’ve met while traveling, can confirm about the Philippines. While it’s relatively easy to get around, and really easy to talk to locals – because pretty much everyone speaks English – your chances of “stumbling” onto the best roadside restaurant, or having consistently good bowls of soups and stews, aren’t really guaranteed without someone’s recommendation. Granted, this is so much easier these days with everything being online, but with that comes another problem: how do you trust what’s good? And, you got to keep in mind that this doesn’t really apply out in the provinces where the best cooking often is. For that, for those really regional specialties that aren’t served in restaurants because people don’t even think of preparing it for anyone outside their homes – because it’s either an everyday dish or pegged as the lowly peasant fare that folks in the countryside wouldn’t even think of serving – you got to have the right connections to find that kind of food, the food that you travel for.
08:44 The reality of travel
BK: I think for me it’s more than just the recipes. I quite like the context, knowing a bit about their background – the recipes I mean. The first trip I made for Milk Pigs happened in May 2010. Way back then I thought I could probably complete this in around four trips. I really remember sitting down with my friend – Susanne – she was the one with whom I ventured to the Cordillera and Ilocos. That was the very, very first trip up. I was going to Manila, going to Baguio, going all the way up north to Laoag, and then flying back down. So at first we thought, okay it will be Luzon. Or it will be Luzon covered in two parts, and then Visayas, and then Mindanao. Three round trips around two to three weeks each. So that’s how it started. Very, very naive. Extremely ignorant, because I have never gone that far north. So I knew nothing about road conditions, I knew nothing about weather conditions, and the thing about Central and North Luzon is that some parts are inaccessible. Now it’s getting better, but definitely wasn’t that easy to make travel plans. Just traveling between two towns could take you three to four hours.
10:06 Why guides are crucial
BK: Susanne knew someone who could take care of us, so that’s how we arranged the trips. For the whole of the Philippines, I had a contact in every town that I went to, or at least I knew someone having gone to that town before, so I have some form of guidance, which I think is crucial, especially in the Philippines because I wouldn’t have known any better. Sometimes you need people to direct your attention to certain things. So for every trip, I cross out little towns, I list the regions I wanted to visit along with the local dishes or delicacies from each part of the region. So that was how we planned it out because there were certain things I had to cover.
BK: I still remember that breakfast/lunch meeting. We flew in to Manila and we met with our contact and he starts talking about a few things and I start taking notes, taking quite a lot of those. I was so preoccupied with my own little checklist that I now feel I probably didn’t pay as much attention as I should have. There were a lot of juicy morsels that I actually kind of ignored, I took for granted. I only realized this during my second and third trips.
11:24 “Research is ongoing”
BK: Many people say research is preliminary, but the thing is, research is ongoing. You don’t do research, go to a destination, and it’s as though what you see and what you have read before, it’s not as if they click so easily. You don’t travel to confirm and corroborate and go, “Okay, that’s it. Done!” Actually in this region it’s nothing like that. It’s quite an untidy process where, as you go along, the more you uncover, and the more you travel, the more you’re reading up as well. It’s almost like two tasks that run parallel to one another, and you got to make sure your eyes are on both.
NA: That’s totally right. So I asked Bryan if he could tell us more, give an example to show what he means...and we ended up talking about a place I had also recently visited, the provinces of Ilocos.
12:19 Foods of the Ilocos Region
BK: I do love the north quite a lot and people who ask me about what was my favorite time, it was actually that trip. I knew I wanted to cover pinikpikan in the Cordillera. I knew that I wanted to look at pinakbet in the Ilocos to see how it was done traditionally. Pinapaitan. If you ask any Ilocano what they miss from home, I think dinengdeng is probably one of the first few things they mention. For those who don’t know what dinengdeng is, it’s basically a very light, almost soupy vegetable braise with bagoong being the main source of umami, although sometimes grilled fish is slipped in to give it a little bit of lovely smokiness and savoriness. It has all kinds of vegetables. Very unique dish, it has no oil because everything is simply being simmered. It’s what many an Ilocano has come to love. It’s what many of them miss when they’re overseas, especially when prepared with bamboo shoots and saluyot.
13:31 “You never really know until you travel”
NA: Man, all that stuff just sounds AMAZING! And that’s why, as Bryan says…
BK: You never really know until you start traveling. The first time you set foot on a country – not for a holiday – but with the intention of writing about something in the country, in that place, for me the mood is completely different.
NA: Again, I totally agree.
13:57 On locals’ generosity
BK: I was actually very, very fortunate that people were so generous with their time. The first market I went to outside of Manila was Tarlac, and then we went to Cordillera. So that entire leg for me was a huge eye-opener, and I do recall coming away from it quite overwhelmed. There were so many things I had to take note of, I mean smells, tastes, sights, and in addition to everything that you are experiencing yourself in terms of the senses, you also have to bear in mind that you have to record information about the food and about the recipes of course.
BK: I did worry that people would be a bit thorny with me in giving their recipes away, but I was quite fortunate in the Philippines because I didn’t really have that. People were mostly very, very generous. There’s this joy, really, and it was overwhelming, peoples’ warm generosity. And of course the information they shared with me, to me that’s a gift.
15:05 A Filipino approach to cooking
BK: Sometimes you can kind of tell people’s personality based on how they cook. So to me it’s more of like a window into their psyche. There are some people who take up the pains of making something simple into quite something quite complex by giving you a whole list of steps and there’s some people who’ve taken that same recipe and they just put everything in the same pot and boil the thing up.
NA: I asked Bryan how, exactly, he went about writing recipes for the book. Were they strictly recreations of dishes that people shared with him? Or were they more of a springboard to create versions that most people – in Southeast Asia at least – could make at home with ingredients from a local grocery store?
BK: Well, I obtained a lot of them through very, very casual conversation. Just talking to people where I didn’t really expect to get recipes. But these cooks often insisted that I take note of how they did it. So, with that amount of pride, I felt that I had a lot to answer for, simply because I was a strange Singaporean boy that’s collecting recipes. At the end of it, these recipes do belong to other people, and I wanted to make sure I took good care of them. I guess that, for me, there was a sense of accountability that I wanted to explain myself and I wanted to tell people why I made some changes.
BK: Also, the ingredients here are quite different. For example, even the vinegar you get in the Philippines is so different. You’ve got nipa palm vinegar. In Ilocos, you got the beautiful mahogany colored vinegar from the sugarcane. We don’t have that here. If you go to Lucky Plaza, which is where most people get their Philippine ingredients, you’ll be met with the most basic, which is sugarcane vinegar, just a very clear solution, very clean solution. It’s very good to use but it lacks a lot of nuance that you get from a vinegar you probably would get in the Philippines in a market. You can even pick your bagoong and your fish sauce. So, while people have the luxury of saying, “I want this kind of vinegar for my adobo. I don’t want to use the run-off-the-mill sugarcane vinegar. I want to use something from beneath the palm.” To be able to make that choice is a luxury!
NA: Oh I know Bryan, pretty much everyone outside the Philippines has the same problem! It’s one of the things we totally miss about home.
17:49 How much rests on the quality of ingredients
BK: When you look at a cookbook on Philippine food, it doesn’t take a lot to realize that a lot of the dishes are very, very simple. I mean Philippine cooking on the whole is extremely simple. Very, very few things are complicated and for me, going to the market and seeing the variety, of course vinegar is just one of them. Bagoong, patis, rice. The variety of rice you have over there, and full of fresh produce, vegetables, is amazing! Amazing stuff. For me everything just clicked. You realize how the quality of these dishes, how much of that rests on the quality of the ingredients.
NA: This is one of the great things about Bryan, and one of the best parts of talking with him. Remembering that he is – as he calls himself – this strange Singaporean boy - as much as I cannot wait to explore Singapore’s hawker stalls, and much as many Filipinos would jump at the opportunity to visit, it’s worth remembering that for all the culinary delights of Singapore, we have so much to be proud of in the Philippines, for the rich history and variety of our foodways. As he describes, there’s so much to see and eat and sample here! Singapore may have flourished with so many food traditions from Southeast Asia mingling in the heat of their woks – contributing to an exquisite, greatly, greatly delicious cuisine that is uniquely Singaporean – but in the Philippines, with the variations in our topography and landscape – these dense, mountainous areas jutting out of endless fields; the seas with species of fish too many to count – we got a lot to be proud of.
NA: This is why I feel, kind of like a bit of a broken record saying that to TRULY appreciate Filipino food – stripped of any pretension or fusion or adaptiveness – to understand why our palates have developed in such a way, and evolved to accommodate all these shortcuts that many contemporary cooks turn to, you’ve got to go back to the source and taste what those different types of vinegar, those fresh vegetables from the market, and loads of live seafood taste like. I know, it can be a lot to plan a trip to the Philippines, but I assure you that for someone who is anywhere near interested in those nuances and the real flavors of Philippine cuisine? It’s totally worth it!
20:29 “No wonder people feel so strongly!”
BK: And so when you see things in such variety, for me it makes a lot of sense. How people can be so bubblingly enthusiastic about it, or how they could feel so strongly about it. Because – this is what I could perceive anyway – a lot about Philippine cuisine, even on the palate, it isn’t extraordinarily complicated. It’s not like Thai where you necessarily have sweet, sour, salty, at those volumes, because the thing about Thai food – glorious as it is – it’s also quite loud in that sense. I mean, some of it in the flavor profile, it’s quite loud. You have a taste of a papaya salad and you know what’s there, you know the sweet is there, everything hits you.
BK: In the Philippines, if we’re talking about a lot of soups, a lot of it comes down to nuance, and this delicateness is in quite a lot of the food. So something like vinegar, I couldn’t begin to understand why just simply changing the vinegar will result in a very different dish. I might not have understood it before, just reading a recipe book, or why changing an ingredient, just one or two ingredients in a dish, would produce something that deserves a different name. Just seeing how much variety there is over there. It really made me really quite appreciative of it. For me, it simply made more sense after seeing everything like that.
22:16 On food terminology
NA: On the subject of food terminology...
BK: The real bug me was having to explain it to people. I mean even something like suman, for example. God the sleepless nights, because we used to make a lot of nonya kueh at home, “kueh” being local rice cakes, if you like, or snacks. We would always have an excess of glutinous rice.
NA: And Bryan shares that their housekeeper – who was Filipina – would always find a use for this glutinous rice.
BK: I do know that this is not the traditional way of doing it, but what she would do is that she sort of resuscitates this cold rice in a bit of gata or in some coconut milk or coconut cream, and she would swaddle them up in a banana leaf, these tapering locks, and then she would steam them. That was my first encounter with suman. She called them suman anyway, I think most people would.
BK: Even something like that, how do you explain to people how suman is... on one hand, it’s the name of something very specific and something very, very generic, because suman is simply a rice cake. And to also explain to people that, “Well you know, in some ways the bibingka can also be called a similar rice cake.” So, for example, suman in the Visayas is budbud. If you spoke to any Visayan, they would do well to tell you that, “No! You don’t call it suman here!” and the difference is that budbud has got ginger inside, and maybe a bit of pandan. I find that quite fascinating, only because of where I come from in Singapore and of course, in Malaysia, how most times you won’t even bother with it with a different name. Of course people probably will say it’s a language difference, blah blah blah, and I get all of that. I completely get it. But for me it’s fascinating because I have to explain why this particular item wants a completely new name, and it’s just one small ingredient change.
NA: I love this and find it really interesting as well. Honestly, people can be FIERCE when it comes to what regional foods are named. And you don’t even have to wait until visiting the Philippines to see that. All you gotta do is lurk around a couple of Facebook groups, I’ll have some links in the show notes, about regional Philippine cuisine and you’ll see people argue – or at the very least – have some really animated discussions about what certain foods, ingredients or snacks from their respective hometowns are called. Like upwards of 83 comments worth.
24:58 Feedback from readers
BK: One thing a lot of people told me was, “Oh I did not know that it’s something in this region,” that there’s some delicacy in another town, in another region, on a different island, that’s quite similar to something they have at home. I mean, I don’t really see myself as an authority. I see myself as someone who’s learning as he goes along. Something else is that, people often say, “I did not know that there’s so much to explore, there’s so much to eat.” For people to say that after reading the book that’s written by a foreigner, I find it quite moving and I’m grateful.
NA: Well, we’re pretty thankful too that Filipino food has made such an impression and become such a significant part of Bryan’s life. Even if many of us never actually get to go to the towns he’s visited, or ask the empanada makers of Ilocos what exactly goes into that beyond-tasty sausage and papaya filling in the famous Vigan empanadas, reading about it gets my taste buds going, and piques my interest to find out more about those delicious foods that I can attempt to make at home. With the recipes, photographs and kitchen notes in Bryan’s book and many others, this definitely counts toward my own journey of Exploring Filipino Kitchens.
WRAP-UP
Many thanks to Bryan Koh for recording this interview with me last year, and if you find yourself in Singapore, head over to “Chalk Farm,” Bryan’s cake shop on Orchard Road. I’ve been drooling over this pandan and adzuki bean cake they make and wish I could have one shipped over to me!
Also coming up this year is Bryan’s third book called “Bekwoh: Stories and Recipes from Peninsula Malaysia’s East Coast.” That’s coming up in August and I can’t wait to get my copy.
Our theme music is by David Szesztay, segment music is by Eric and Magill and Squire Tuck, which you’ll find on fma.org.Visit exploringfilipinokitchens.com for past episodes, and if you’re listening to this through a podcast app, please go ahead and click that subscribe button, so we can continue Exploring Filipino Kitchens together!
Maraming salamat, and thank you for listening.
Find the transcript to my episode "On Travel With Purpose To Manila, A Farm And Ancestral Lands" below.
INTRO
Welcome to Exploring Filipino Kitchens. I’m your host, Nastasha Alli.
This episode, we’re going off the usual path - actually, quite a ways off from my studio in Toronto, back to where it all begins - the Philippines.
We can’t really explore Filipino kitchens, without going to the motherland, right?
So today, no interviews - just some raw thoughts from my trip, instead - and you’ll hear horns rise above the traffic of Manila, tricycles speeding by, the calm of the countryside and horses on the cobbled streets of Vigan, Ilocos Sur.
Let’s go!
ON TRAVEL WITH PURPOSE
Hello everyone! It is now Friday. I’ve been in Manila for about a week now. I landed on Sunday morning and, to be honest, everything is a bit of a whirlwind. It’s such a barrage on the senses to be back here amidst the traffic and noise you could probably hear just outside the window. I’m staying in Makati City which is the central business district of Manila.
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been meeting with people for interviews for the podcast and to reconnect with some friends I’m so glad to have been able to meet.
01:54 A walk through the old walled city
The city can swallow you up, and that’s the case for any big city, whether you grew up in it or moved there for school or for work. Yesterday, I went on a tour of Intramuros, which is the old walled city of Manila. I took a tour of Intramuros that’s run by a friend of mine, and it was really interesting because we talked about Philippine history in a completely different context than what we were taught in schools, from grade school all the way up to high school, and even college.
There’s such a big gap in all of this. How food, culture and traditions to be specific, is communicated to young people. I really hope that at some point, the educational curriculum in high schools and all the way through college, and especially if you go to a culinary institution like I did... it would just make such a big difference to have that type of content where you talk about the history of Philippine cuisines, providing context around the culture of how and why our food traditions have developed in this particular way. It’s something that just doesn’t exist right now.
It’s not to say the people aren’t doing something about it. They definitely are. And the big part of the reason I’m here is because I wanna talk to these people, and try in my little way, to bring these stories to life a bit more. To show people all over the world, whether you’re local or somebody who’s just visiting the Philippines - one of the many backpackers who are traveling through this area I’m in right now - that the Philippines has such a unique food culture and heritage and traditions that are kind of buried under the surface, they’re hidden. They’re there but they definitely need a bit of explanation. Telling those stories through a local’s perspective is necessary, because foreign food writers coming into the city and talking about the latest Filipino heritage restaurant that’s opened is important, but it doesn’t paint the right picture. Filipino people have such a deep story to tell. Their experiences are what you can’t really replicate, and telling those stories in our voices, I think, is something that’s really lacking.
05:12 Why “the middles” matter
How it affects me is that, growing up here I always think about why would I spend several thousand pesos on a meal, when I could go down the road and not have the same ambiance or the same quality of food, but... [it’s] still sinigang, still adobo, still lumpia, all that stuff that you want in a Filipino restaurant.
I really, really wanna be able to find a way to bridge that gap between what people see, what people understand of Philippine cuisine and culture because that story of “the middles,” they need to be told.
But what exactly do I mean by “the middles?” Well, from a food perspective - I mean, stories about what the hundred thousand people who work at night in call centers around the country, eat for “lunch” at four in the morning. Or the history of street food staples like fish balls, kikiam (made with tofu skins), “adidas” and “PAL” that are honestly my favorite examples of odd bits and ends transformed into truly Filipino foods by their taste, preparation, affordability and name. Who else shouts, “Adidas please!” when they want some grilled chicken feet?
Probably not the handful of tycoons who basically run the Philippines, but people like those call center workers, who spend hours in traffic on the way home during the morning rush.
Those are people who I grew up with. Many of my friends worked and have built their careers and their adult lives around that industry. It’s a big driver of the Philippine economy now to be sure. Walking around the city, driving through the major highways, I see these large condo towers that are very similar to the way the condo boom in Toronto is happening and in many centers around the world, where you have people who were coming in from the provinces...and finding that prosperity and financial stability they didn’t have. That means a lot to them.
This is why the story of the middles matter. Because we now have the technology and the ability to reach so many people with stories of the food the sustains us – like, a fried chicken rice meal from the corner store, and the food that we celebrate with, like the sizzling sisig at spots like Manam or Sarsa in Manila that your Instagram-loving friend just has to have for their birthday.
This stuff is popular for a reason. It’s not just because we love fatty, salty foods. But, because it’s within reach and embedded in everyday Filipino’s definition of “comfort food,” and it’s been that way for decades, which is not a long time, actually. Coming from mass marketing that’s pushed American deep fried chicken into the cores of our hearts, and of economic conditions that turned chopped up pig’s cheeks, ears and skin, from leftovers into a restaurant specialty. That’s Filipino ingenuity.
But it’s not all rosy. If you look at things a little deeper - like I tend to do - you’ll notice class distinctions arise even when we talk about food. Like, for example, how certain kinds of food are so closely associated with the people who tend to make and eat them.
While I was in Manila, I stayed at this little bed and breakfast, a restored heritage house with a really cozy, kind of Spanish-era feel. The front desk got my request for a room with a balcony, adding that the neighbor next door made steamed rice cakes, called puto, every morning. “It might get a little loud,” she said, “when he starts grinding the rice.”
And then she goes, “Ma’am, you know they do that at four in the morning. We asked them if they could be quiet, but they said that they also have their business to run.” My first instinct was, I don’t want these people to have to change what they’re doing. That’s their way of life, that’s their living! That disparity is jarring sometimes.
It took me awhile to understand why this particular thing stuck with me. On a base level, it’s because I felt uneasy that as a guest at this boutique hotel - I’m awarded this kind of superiority, some kind of outward power over the puto maker. The guy who wakes up at three a.m. every morning to grind rice, make batches of batter, steam the cakes, wrap them in banana leaves, load them onto his cart, and then actually walk around the neighborhood for several hours in the hot sun hawking the rice cakes he’s made. That takes so much work, and an artisanship on the maker’s behalf. This guy doesn’t measure, and somehow the rice cakes turn out consistently fluffy even when the weather’s crazy humid and there’s a torrential downpour.
In place of apologies that a maker of native delicacies may possibly wake guests with the sound of their work, I hope that someday the front desk says something like, “By the way, you’re in the best part of town. There’s a native rice cake maker right next door, and if you want freshly steamed rice cakes with some butter or salted eggs for breakfast, all you have to do is ask.”
11:38 At the Gawad Kalinga Enchanted Farm
Next, we’re off to the farm, because I love going to farms.
I’m at the Gawad Kalinga Enchanted Farm. It is someplace in Angat, Bulacan which is about two hours or so outside Manila, give or take. This place is amazing. It’s got a working farm and there’s a couple of other buildings down the road where a lot of the students who are part of a program here called SEED, which is the School for Experiential [and Entrepreneurial] Development. They have been so overwhelmingly amazing, and I can’t even begin to describe how floored I am by a lot of these kids and what they’re doing.
12:35 Growing SEED (The School for Experiential and Entrepreneurial Development)
This is not a regular school. According to Gawad Kalinga - the non-profit that houses this school - it’s “an education based solution to rural development.” I highly encourage you to visit gk1world.com/seed for more information.
In short, it stands for “School for Experiential and Entrepreneurial Development.” It’s a two-year program developed by a range of innovators in the education, social enterprise and agriculture industries. The school is positioned as an alternative to community college. Basically, instead of taking generic courses, students apply for SEED and get housing, food, and an education for free, covered by a scholarship at the farm.
The program covers character and community development, business management, communications, financial literacy and courses on agriculture. While all of this seems pretty standard, the important thing to remember is who applies to be a SEED scholar. Those students are 18-20 year olds from some of the most poverty-stricken areas of the Philippines, from slums in big cities to parts of Mindanao where armed conflict is a part of everyday life.
The goal is to show these students how and why they are “world-class Filipinos,” an idea that Gawad Kalinga’s founder, Tony Meloto, stands proudly behind. To develop the countryside and uplift millions of farming families who live way below the poverty line, they say the focus needs to go back to farming sustainably and to growing crops that thrive in Philippine soil.
SEED follows a holistic approach to solving these kinds of issues. By providing young people from poor communities - the only ones who understand their problems best - what they need to succeed, they become more than a social entrepreneur or business owner. They become people who live with dignity and have an immense pride in their work. That was something I could see from the titas who served us meals and the people who manned the corner store. They become community builders who organize weekly volleyball matches and who, like a cog in the machine of empowering other people, think of themselves as more than just “a poor person.”
And so, back to the farm…
15:36 Why I love the countryside
The place where I’m sitting at right now is at the top level of a spot that faces this:
“I’m sitting in front of a tranquil rice field, with plots of land stretching as far as the eye can see, through the hills and into the horizon. It was late afternoon and the sun looked like a Sunkist orange, with carabaos and farmers dotting the field. I imagine, for a second, this is what it might have felt like for a plantation owner.”
Just to give you a better rundown of the people I’ve met here so far. I have been at the farm by taking a week-long tour with a company called MAD Travel, which stands for “Make A Difference” Travel. They are a social enterprise that also started at the farm. People who come here say that it’s life-changing and I understand and see why...because coming here throws you into the deep end of things.
But what exactly do I mean by that? Well, when you arrive at the farm, you start with a tour of the grounds. That includes the main assembly halls, the dorms, the cafeteria, the pool and basketball court, and further on something called “The Bamboo Palace” which I quickly fell in love with. Depending the kind of tour you get, you either spend an afternoon, several days or a full week with different entrepreneurs at the farm - preparing things like peanut brittle or carabao milk cheese, locally made iced teas, chocolate pastries or vegetables for community dinners.
You will meet so many different kinds of people at the farm. I get emotional thinking how, even in my short visit, I learned so much from the people I met. There was Christine - shout out! - our MAD travel guide and all around awesomest 18-year-old I know, well, after my sisters. She arranged our dinners, hung out with us and talked about her community at the farm, and had the prettiest pixie outfit hands down at the Halloween party - and yes, it was the best Halloween party I’ve been to in ages. There was tita Jenny and tito Jun, a bit of a power couple and host family for a number of French interns throughout the years. We saw beautiful pictures of their kids and the kids who’ve lived them, and on more than one occasion, was treated to jokes like this from tito Jun:
18:34 “What song does a centipede hate?”
“Are you familiar with the centipede? You know centipede?”
“Yes, yes.”
“What is the most hated song by that centipede or millipede? You want a clue?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a nursery rhyme, children’s song. Imagine the centipede singing, I have two hands, the left and the right, the left and the right, the left and the right…”
I legit cannot stop laughing every time I’ve listen to this clip. It’s just such a really good reflection of what our week was like there at the farm.
19:29 “Walang iwanan,” or no one is left behind
The two girls I’m living with here, both from the UK. They’re traveling throughout Southeast Asia and they booked the tour without much background about what Gawad Kalinga is, what the farm is about, and even I had a little bit of difficulty explaining to them at the beginning, know what’s to expect, because frankly I had no idea either. Everyone I’ve talk to so far from the dozens of French interns were here – there’s a lot of them – people who live in the community and the Gawad Kalinga communities, that very simple concept of “walang iwanan,” which in English means that ‘no one is left behind,’ is really the driving force to everything here. It allows people to approach problems and challenges and really different ways. Everyone who’ve we met, it just shows you on a really basic level how accommodating, warm-hearted, hospitable, and humbling it can be to live in the Philippines.
21:05 The stories that get to the heart of me
Many people go through tons of different challenges. This afternoon I was speaking with a student from that school I was talking about earlier. Many students have had started all these amazing businesses. Throughout the course of the week that I’ve been here, I’ve cried several times just listening to the passion and drive these people have. People who work in fancy startups in the big cities could learn more than a thing or two from them.
The person who I was talking with this afternoon developed a brand of flavored sweet potato chips and banana chips. She’s funny, she’s telling me that she dropped out of school for a couple of years due to a number of things going on at home. Really did not think that she would have the confidence at all to do much more than that.
I just have to stop here for a second, because there’s a reason I’m telling this story. This girl, who just so gamely agreed to sit down with me and tell me about this vegetable chip business they started - she later tells me, in Tagalog, that she was adopted and up until high school, didn’t really have any problems with the family who took her in. She did very well and got top honors in her class, and that allowed her to attend a private school on scholarship. But when her adoptive dad lost his job, things started to go south. Money became scarce to the point that – although she received another scholarship to go to college – the adoptive parents chose to send her sibling, their own child, to higher education. What you need to remember is that along with tuition, there are a lot of other costs that come out of pocket with attending college in the Philippines, like daily living expenses, books, supplies, money for transportation, etc. They couldn’t afford to give two kids that, so they chose one.
Depression set in, and in the two years she lived at home, she was abused by a relative.
Her story isn’t singular, as I learned many kids have similar reasons for coming here. I say that I’m floored by them, because beyond of all this – that sheer determination, that will to succeed and make a difference for themselves – it drives these students to do more with the help of others. Everything is done together here, and repeatedly, she tells me that without her family here at Gawad Kalinga, there’s no way her business and her life would have turned out the way it has. It’s a support group and for these young adults, it’s the strongest, strongest kind. People who have already faced insurmountable difficulties in their lives find a home and an environment for them to grow in.
She’s talking about putting all her products through prototyping, spending so much time on product development marketing, learning the financial end of things. She mentioned that they used to take tricycles just around town and now they are going to Manila and Makati, places in the city where big corporations and big companies are based. One of their co-founders has gone to France and Australia. I met her briefly the other day. She said that she used to be a street vendor and after two years of the program – through very hard work, perseverance, dedication – has managed to put up her business, speak on behalf of her fellow students, to go places in France and Australia that they’ve gone to. As I’ve spoken to people over time, you just see that, coming here, if you expect this beautiful orchard – with organic vegetables and farm-fresh meals everyday – it’s not necessarily the case, but that’s not the point.
The point is that you have to come with open mind and heart as you possibly can because that is what’s most rewarding. You get to meet people from so many different backgrounds. People who come here for very different reasons, but have found their purpose and place by immersing themselves in the communities. I think the biggest takeaway from this is that, if the students who come into that SEED program are faced with so many things that would make so many people just falter and fall...it’s never a barrier for them, and they don’t even think of it as a reason to not do things and not keep going. That determination to succeed is driven by the fact that they want to make a difference for their family, then for themselves, as a secondary thing. It’s always the family first.
The great thing about traveling is that, you get all these opportunities to be exposed to other people and ideas that hopefully provide enough food for thought for you to learn from. If the only thing that I can do for now is to share these stories with you, and if you’re willing to listen, I hope you are inspired to learn more about it and realize that the Philippines is so rich in products that are really good. I’ve had some carabao milk butter that’s bloody fantastic and is served in Amanpulo, in some of the top restaurants in Manila right now by one of the city’s top pastry chefs. I’ve also tasted ice cream made from carabao milk, flavoured with ube.
There’s so much untapped potential in the Philippines, in general, and I truly, truly believe that.
28:59 A journey to ancestral lands
Finally, we head to Zambales, a coastal province also within a few hours’ drive of Manila. I found out about this trip called Tribes and Treks online, and the idea behind the tour just seemed totally up my alley.
Going through the ancestral lands of the Yangil tribe was such an experience; it was just why I travel. We met an amazing group of people who were there for something called “Life Stories,” which is what MAD Travel organizes in coordination with ‘Where To Next’ – a online group of people who want to travel with purpose, who are curious about the Philippines. It’s a group of people in their 20s and 30s – young professionals – who wanted to participate in the kind tour that allowed to see things a little bit differently and share a little bit about their life story, any challenges they’re facing, what things are on their mind that mean something to them.
This whole process of learning about ancestral Philippine cultures, about indigenous tribes whose livelihoods are very close to the brink of disappearing, it just highlights the need for sustainable travel and supporting those types of communities. For the Yangil tribe, for example, their lands were nearly wiped off the map when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991.
Lots of land was just covered in ash and sand. You have these pictures of churches where the only thing that’s left are tall belfries that are several stories off the ground. Trekking through that terrain where the sun is just punishingly hot, for the while you are walking though it...as a traveler from the city or even out of the country – you go, “who lives in these types of conditions?”
You trek through these rivers that just cut through the lands. You have the mountain ranges in your backdrop. You can see it if you look left or right, walking alongside carabaos and the chief of the tribe who has accompanied us from the drop-off point up to their village. The first thing we did when we got there was we planted seedlings. As they explained, much of this terrain really took a very long time to regenerate because, what once was fertile soil was just covered by sand and ash, and nothing grows there.
Just listening to their stories of how, after the first several years, life was very, very hard for them because it was a day-to-day struggle of surviving. What they were able to previously rely on – things as simple as root crops, fruit from trees – all gone. These ancestral lands are at the risk of losing their traditional food ways, their traditional ways of living. Younger people are more and more leaving their tribes and going off to the city.
One story that one of the elders shared was with regard to schooling. At the community they have a multi-purpose hall which serves as community center, a place where people gather to talk about any visitors who are coming to town, stuff that happens around. It also serves as the classroom for kids, basically up until first or second grade.
There’s about 30 kids there right now, and once you go past that, they basically have to make this 10-kilometer trek – the same trek we were on – up to the drop-off point where they would have to walk into town to attend school. Everybody does this. From when you’re eight or nine years old, in the second grade all the way up to high school if you make it there.
34:27 Planting black-eyed peas in a nursery in a valley
Going back to what we did, we planted some seedlings – black-eyed peas – called kadyos in the local dialect. We stuck them into little black bags where we had some potting soil. The goal is to just regenerate as much of it as possible. For some of the trees – mango trees, rattan trees – their eventual goal is to be able to plant these trees back into the slopes of the mountains, which, as beautiful as they were...you could totally see the contours of the mountain ranges, you realize they’re beautiful and you could see so much detail from them. But that’s because they’re completely empty of trees. It’s going to take many years and a lot of heroic effort on behalf of visitors and locals together, to begin that process of replanting. Being there just makes you realize how much of this is very much a big picture, but also very localized and concentrated.
35:49 The Yangil Tribe
After we planted the seedlings, we bathed in the river for a little while. By ‘bathe’, I mean, we just got in there with our trekking gear, little rocks everywhere in our clothing. And then we headed off into the village of the Yangil tribe. We were met by a small community of about 35-50 families. Lots of kids around with the biggest smiles on their faces. The elders of the tribe had prepared this beautiful feast for us with their version of tinola, a chicken soup with green papayas, chili leaves, ginger. And we had chicken adobo, which was very tasty, a salad with some locally grown tomatoes and onions – everything has to be locally grown because, again, really the only way to get into the village is through that trek and hauling stuff in, like actual groceries and whatnot, requires the use of a carabao and a cart.
They performed some traditional dances for us. We got to shoot bows and arrows. Just the openness of every person in that community that they shared with us, people in the city who were just coming in for an afternoon...to see a genuine appreciation from the kids who were there, is the kind of stuff that makes such an impression on you. It really does make for real travel with purpose. With MAD Travel, their mission is to promote sustainable social tourism, which means that, we go there to learn about traditional indigenous cultures and also to provide a form of income for the community where there previously was none.
37:46 The importance of a light switch
Just to give you a bit of the impact of this, one day before we got there, there was a group of guests who came with Globe Telecom, one of the two big mobile phone carriers in the Philippines. Someone from that team had visited or heard about the place and had a fundraiser to donate a solar panel to the community. The chief was proudly showing us that they now have electricity in their little town hall. Over time, people have donated books for kids, little sets of chairs and tables. Very simple stuff you need for a classroom.
And just that, bringing a solar panel to provide light and a charging station for their mobile phones, that in itself is a big thing for them because that’s their way of communicating with the outside world.
38:41 Tourism that gives back
In 2017, that is a very concrete example of the benefit that this type of income generation can sustain for communities because it’s the combination of being there and learning from other travelers that really, really gives me hope for the future of this type of tourism in the Philippines. Of tourism that gives back, bringing a livelihood into areas that have struggled through very long periods of time preserving the Aetas’ culture.
One way that made very much sense to me, as our guide from MAD Travel had put it, is that, in the past, with so much of the struggle of each person in the community put towards staying afloat, towards living, your focus gets shifted away from preserving the knowledge of what their ancestors have passed on to them through generations.
Another activity we did was just walking around the forest and having elders of the tribe point out different plants and how to use it. A lot of them only have native names. They’d pick something up, let us crush the leaves, and then they’d explain that “this is used if you have colds, if kids have a stomach ache, as a source of food, from different trees and root crops and plants.”
The important thing is that, we recognize at this point that this type of knowledge is something that has to be preserved. If we don’t provide communities a means of livelihood to take care of their basic necessities, they have no other choice but resort to instant noodle packets because that is what’s available to them, that’s what they can get from town. Doing that diminishes the knowledge and the pride that older folks in the community have, and it just doesn’t allow them to pass on that knowledge to younger people. Younger people then in turn, don’t see the value in preserving all this.
I think that’s a great effect of having visitors come into the community with a stated purpose. Not for us to bring in luxury facilities or whatnot...but to understand that all this is “for you” because, as much as we’re there to experience how people live there on a day-to-day basis, we go in with the knowledge that we want to do this to help preserve that heritage. It’s something that I would really like more people to experience, especially Filipinos who are living abroad or have not grown up in the Philippines.
If you travel any place with the mindset of just learning as much as you can from that area, I think you do walk away with so much more than that day’s experience.
WRAP-UP
Special thanks this episode to my friend Dustin of Manila for a Day Tours. Please check them out online at manilaforaday.com. I highly recommend his 3G or God, Gold and Glory tour, for an experience walking around the old city of Intramuros like no other.
Also my warmest thanks to the folks behind MAD Travel. You guys, you’ve got a place in my heart and I look forward to working with you on bringing more guests to experience what the Philippines has to offer! Visit madtravel.org for more information about upcoming trips and the amazing partners they work with, like the super chill Circle Hostel in Zambales where we stayed. Find them on Facebook and Instagram, where you can also follow Where to Next at wtn_wheretonext. You will love this feed.
Our theme music is by David Szestay, other music for this episode is by Eric and Magill, Komiku, JBlanked and Blue Dot Sessions. Visit fma.org to hear their music and more.
As always, you can find me online at exploringfilipinokitchens.com. We’ve got past episodes on this site and you can also find Exploring Filipino Kitchens on Facebook and Instagram. If you liked what you hear, I would really, really love it if you told a friend!
Maraming, maraming salamat, and thank you, for listening.
Find the transcript of my interview with Dr. Ame Garong below.
INTRO
Welcome to Exploring Filipino Kitchens. I’m your host, Nastasha Alli.
I would like to start off this episode by saying that, there were a lots of times over the past couple months, where I’ve felt way in over my head. And that’s pretty common, right? I don’t always trust that I can figure stuff out, and when that happens, my confidence just tanks when things don’t go right.
But when they do, things can turn out really, really well. This summer I co-hosted a Filipino food tour in Toronto, where we visited three Filipino food spots in the city that were run by second-generation Filipino-Canadians. They’re really different from each other, and honestly, I loved getting to know this community!
It was fantastic getting to know these different business owners who were totally passionate about sharing Filipino food in ways they knew how to do best. The first place we visited was a fast-casual restaurant that used to be some place where you could buy groceries and send home a “Balikbayan Box.” The other was an artisan ice cream shop - you know, the kinds that sell those black ice cream cones - with lines out the door for creamy ube ice cream and polvoron pie. The third was a bar, and oh, I love bars! They make everything in-house, from noodles made with squid ink to longganisa sausages with this crazy good marbling, made with pasture-raised pigs just outside the city.
Talking to these really driven, super passionate people about the businesses that they’ve built their lives around made me realize a couple of things:
One, you really can’t take away this knack that Filipinos have for being hospitable people.
Another is that we really do want to cook this kind of food, the food we know best, for others because it is legitimately good and we want you to try it.
Third, we do what it takes to educate ourselves and our customers about the tastes and the food culture of the Philippines.
Those types of realizations, it’s pretty profound when you think about it - these guys are in their 20s and 30s, they’re people my age, and they’re doing what they can to bring that food culture forward.
All of this, in essence, drives the question that I want to answer this episode: Why do we need to know about the history of our foods, and going a little bit deeper into that, about the ancient Filipino diet?
That’s what we’re talking about this episode.
Thankfully, we’ve got the foremost authority on the subject as guest on our show today. Dr. Ame Garong, who’s a researcher of the Archeology Division at the National Museum of the Philippines, wrote a book in 2013 called “Ancient Filipino Diet.” It’s the first study of Filipino food in prehistory, before any colonizers or foreign influence arrived in the Philippines. It’s written to explore and understand the prehistoric diet of our ancestors.
Admittedly, the book itself is pretty technical, but its contents are outstanding. Today, we’re talking with Dr. Garong about her research and her experiences at the different places they visited, digging for clues to tell us what our ancestors ate. Also, kind of answering how much of this lines up with what we eat today as Filipinos both in the Philippines and outside the country.
I’ve been so excited to do this episode for some time now, so let’s get straight into it.
INTERVIEW
04:34 What it’s like to be a Philippine archeologist
NA: Dr. Ame Garong has worked at the National Museum of the Philippines for 21 years…
AG: So it’s quite a long time already that I’m working in the Archeology Division and eventually that became my career as an archaeologist. I’ve been doing lots of excavation, more on burials. My focus is more on zoological research that entails understanding food resources, subsistence of humans in general.
NA: She graduated with a zoology degree in one of the Philippines’ oldest universities, and…
AG: Originally, my intention is to be a doctor. However, I failed to achieve that ambition. Because of my frustration that I did not go to medical school, my father, who is a Methodist pastor, he suggested that why don’t I take a master course in anthropology. So I said, “why not?” Then my father said, “It’s about culture, it’s about humans, so you can know other people by studying them.” So I said, “Oh! That sounds interesting.”
05:55 How her career started
AG: And then along the way, I had a classmate who told me that the National Museum is in need of a zoologist. Since I had a zoology background, and I already had a year of anthropology courses, I decided to apply. However, at first I failed, because they only needed one, and they hired someone who had more experience.
So, again it’s another frustration. However, maybe I was destined to be an archaeologist. A month after, they called me back, informing me that there’s another position. They need a researcher, so I immediately did not think twice. I said, “Yes! I am available…”
NA: Even amongst the most accomplished people, frustration and failure can be pretty common. Despite being a subject that deals with a lot of ancient stuff, archeology in itself is a relatively new field in the Philippines.
AG: It’s like 20 years in the Philippines that we’ve had this. So, maybe not everybody knows that we are offering that course.
07:18 Early fieldwork
NA: I asked Dr. Garong about what some of her early experiences with field work was like. For example, her first excavation site was something called a “habitation site” where…
AG: What I first saw were old potteries, the remains of utensils…
NA: ...and then she got to work on a real burial site, in the province of Negros, where…
07:42 “An accident happened…”
AG: We were excavating this plaza, and they have these funerary goods, Chinese wares or ceramic goods together with the remains of the humans. Of course it’s my first time…
NA: ...and like many first times…
AG: An accident happened. There was this pebble on the ground…
NA: This is like on ground-level ground. So, technically above the actual pit where Dr. Garong and her team was busy cleaning up their latest find.
AG: ...and then there was a movement from the surface. That pebble fell on the skull of the individual and caused the skull to be broken.
NA: Oh no! I would have cried on the spot if that happened to me!
AG: My senior was shocked and I was scolded. But actually, it’s an accident. I was not really aware that there was a pebble there and something just made the movement. I don’t know because I was really engrossed in exposing the skulls, the bones. So I really felt bad after that. It was on my hand, it was under my responsibility. But that’s another lesson learned. From then on, I was so careful and always checking my square if there is something like that. I should remove it before I go down. After that, I’m a bit okay.
09:32 How do we find out what our ancestors ate?
NA: So, if we wanted to find out what our ancestors actually ate as a part of their paleo diet, where would we start? If you were someone like Dr. Garong…
AG: Since I am doing archeology, it’s far beyond the history. So, I’m focusing on diet. We use the paleo-diet analysis. NA: And far beyond the concept of a food trend even existing, this paleo diet was the real deal. That means early humans ate these foods because it’s what they knew how to prepare and consume.
AG: One of the best way to know the paleo diet of our ancestors is by using stable isotope analysis.
NA: But what exactly is stable isotope analysis? That’s pretty technical, I know. And, how does it help us identify what prehistoric Filipinos actually ate? In Dr. Garong’s book, she explains that for stuff that’s organic - think of flesh and blood and anything that goes into a green bin - the ratio of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in that organic matter tends to be stable enough, so that even thousands of years later, we can apply modern technology and scientific techniques to find out where the protein in that properly preserved sample of bones usually comes from.
AG: That’s the best way if you wanted absolute information on diet.
NA: I am totally getting flashbacks of playing “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” and thinking about how awesome it would be, now, to join Dr. Garong on one of these digs.
11:20 What exactly was in their paleo diet?
NA: So, what exactly were some of those foods that ancient Filipinos ate? According to Dr. Garong, she says that, “Food sources in the Philippines, especially plants, haven’t differed much then as now.” She adds that, “Plants collected for this study served as staple food since prehistoric time.”
What that means is that, it includes indigenous varieties of sugarcane, rice and millet. Meaning, ancient Filipinos knew how to grow these crops, and if you momentarily blank on what the Banaue rice terraces are – that’s pretty close to one of the sites Dr. Garong worked in – I suggest you look this up right away.
At some “newer” burial sites, they found corn that came with the Spanish galleons - a much later part of our ancestors’ diet. There were also root crops that included native varieties of taro and yams, and lots of old world bananas. Sago palm was consumed in some regions.
There were gastropods, bivalves - snails, coconut crabs, oysters – shellfish of all kinds. Prehistoric Filipinos, like many people across the world who lived in coastal areas, knew that seaweed was a delicious and really nutritious source of food. There were fish of every size, shape and color. Early ancestors of things like catfish, tilapia, mudfish, dolphin fish and flying fish that you see in some Philippine markets today. Maybe the flying fish is a bit uncommon but in rural areas they might still be around.
Across the archipelago, and especially in mountainous areas as we expected, our ancestors hunted and killed a lot of wild game, including carabao, deer and wild boar. They trapped smaller creatures like bats, civet cats, low-flying birds and other kinds of local fowl like chickens. When they learned how to domesticate animals, a lot of them learned how to herd goats and keep pigs to add to the community’s food supply. Remember, in prehistoric times, barangays, or these communities with a leader usually called the datu, were common ways the communities in the Philippines arranged themselves.
13:53 Stuff they’ve found in archaeological sites
NA: So I asked Dr. Garong if she could give us a few examples of what they found in different areas of the Philippines.
AG: In archeology, once you have decided, you will have an idea of the food resources. If you have some animals that you recovered from your excavation, and then you identify it as a bovine or pig or goat, that will give you an idea. That’s a clue of the possible food sources of those individuals. But then, it’s just a clue…
NA: Which means that a scientifically-backed isotope analysis basically trumps what we simply used to presume, were the things people ate, because we found some gnawed-out bones buried with the ancients.
AG: What I did, I used the protein to get their sources of nutrients. I extracted the collagen from the bones. I took samples from many individuals. And then, in Japan where I finished my grading, they have a laboratory where you can do everything that you need for a stable isotope analysis. So, you have to extract the collagen from the bones of those individuals and once you get the values, I need also to establish the food resources from those municipalities or areas that I use.
15:32 Batanes and ancient fish
NA: Let’s go on a trip to the Philippines. Some of the sites we visited are: Batanes, Lal-Lo in the Cagayan Valley, Benguet Province, Sta. Ana in Manila, the city capital of Cebu province, and a couple of other places.
AG: One of them is Batanes. Both the National Museum and U.P. Anthropology have excavated in that area. So that means I can get more than five individuals. I also went to Batanes to get samples of their staple food. I can also use that to gauge the value that I can get from my analysis. I went to the fishing village. They have this fish that they said they’ve used as a staple food for a long time. I interviewed elders to ask what they remember as their old food.
NA: This particular fish from Batanes is known as the arayu. It’s a type of dolphin fish that’s line-caught and really a lifeline for many, many generations of local Ivatans. This fish, which is often slung two or three at a time – they’re huge, across fishermen’s backs when they haul them in from the sea – are split down the middle, scored into equal portions, then salted and dried for a week in what can only be called “unpredictable” Batanes weather. Remember, Batanes is at the very tip of the Philippines.
NA: In Batanes these fish are either hung in a dedicated smokehouse that’s made of bamboo and palm trees just outside the kitchen in people’s backyards, or over the hearth in the kitchen, slowly smoked as they go about with their daily cooking, to last for the rest of the year. What’s amazing is, how these local fishermen, called mataw, have perfected this preparation for arayu fish over centuries. It’s such a testament to the artisanship that’s needed to preserve this kind of fish, and it just lasted through time for the very same reasons that their ancestors had this fish for a staple food.
18:07 A giant heap of shell trash in Cagayan Valley
NA: In Lal-Lo, Cagayan Valley…
AG: Going down from Batanes, I worked in Lal-Lo, Cagayan Valley for 10 years from ’95 to 2005. Lal-Lo is very famous for its shell midden. It’s made of freshwater shells. The locals they call it kabibe. We found some burial sites in the shell midden…
NA: …and this shell midden, as Dr. Garong describes it, is basically a large trash heap of discarded shells from sea creatures. They were thrown into this huge pile by generations of prehistoric Filipinos in the Cagayan Valley. Over time, these prehistoric garbage dumps basically also became burial sites. The dead were laid to rest above this layer of shells, and then finally much later on, they were also buried under layers of fine, silty clay that flowed down the river from the mountain ranges up north.
AG: You can see how our ancestors relied on this Cagayan river by gathering and collecting the shells as their food - for the meat - and they just threw it in the riverbank, and it piled up.
NA: And here, Dr. Garong says, some of these shell deposits can get up to 10 feet deep. While some other sites are from the 16th century, and some have been dated to come from as far back as the neolithic period – that’s when people learned how to use metal tools like shovels and axes to domesticate crops and herd animals – this neolithic period in our global history is also widely considered the beginning of farming.
AG: So, that’s the shell midden along the Cagayan river. That is really very interesting.
NA: I’ll say! It’s easy to forget a lot of the history that literally lies under our feet.
One question that stumped Dr. Garong and her Japanese colleagues, though, has to do with what they found after examining those human bones that were at the top of this shell pile. Remember, there’s the 10-foot layer of discarded shells, and then above that were human bones from ancient grave sites. Those human bones must’ve had traces, in somewhat large quantities, of all the shellfish they ate, right? But...
AG: We found out that those who got the shells, they did not eat the shells. Instead, they make the salted kabibe - salted meat - and then it’s like preserved food. Then, they will sell it.
NA: So, all that work that our ancestors did to harvest the shells and extract the meat, turns out that wasn’t even for their own consumption. Instead, it was to make preserved oyster meat, that may have been traded with inland communities or early seafarers that traveled along the Philippine peninsula, possibly going all the way to China, possibly even in encouraging the development of oyster sauce. Mind blown!
21:29 “Tinapa” mummies in Benguet
NA: In Benguet province…
AG: They have this ritual that will last for a year. It’s removing all the muscles, the fat of the individual, like tinapa.
NA: Tinapa is a Tagalog term for smoked fish. Traditionally it’s made with scad or milkfish. It’s salted or brined, hung out to dry and finally, smoked. Tinapa taste intensely of the sea, and I kind of love them ’cos they look like little sun gods basking in their golden brown glow, especially when they’re all laid out in these neat circles on a woven tray called bilao.
AG: All you can see is the skin. It’s only in Cagayan where we can find the practice.
NA: So these mummies in Benguet province, the ones that are found in wooden boxes, have been dried and preserved in a process similar to smoked fish. I wonder if these practices are connected.
In Manila…
AG: If we go to Manila, we have this Sta. Ana site. It’s close to the Pasig river, actually, and based from my studies they utilized the Pasig river for their food.
22:50 Why Cebuanos love corn
NA: In Cebu...
AG: If you go to Visayas area, we have the Bolho-on.
NA: That’s in the province of Cebu. And here’s an interesting thing. If you ask native Cebuanos about some of their favorite foods, no doubt a large chunk of them will swear by corn. But have you ever wondered why is that so?
AG: They cannot grow rice. That’s why they like mais or corn, and millet.
NA: According to what Dr. Garong’s research uncovered, despite being so close to water, most of the human bones they found were actually not composed of sea creatures, but instead largely of plants that are called “C4 plants.” In the book she identifies these as rice, corn and millet. So what we can surmise is that in pre-colonial times, dating back to the same metal age of those shells up in the Cagayan valley, indigenous people in Cebu grew millet. Over time though, rice became a staple crop in other regions of the Philippines and never really took hold in Cebu because the soil was mostly made of limestone, and rice simply don’t grow well on limestone soil.
Later on, when the Spanish brought corn to the Philippines, that’s when locals realized that corn loved this kind of soil and growing environment. So, mais thrived and never left the Cebuanos’ diet.
Next, I wanted to know: what were some challenges that Dr. Garong and her team came across?
24:51 Challenge #1: Time and thieves
AG: If it’s already past 5:00 pm, we need to stop our digging, our excavation. Before you remove and recover all the materials, including the bones, you have to properly expose it. Our scientific illustrator needs to draw the whole structure or the whole skeleton, including the artifact, together with the human remains.
NA: So, as Dr. Garong tells us about her early digs, they’d go about their work and, at the end of the day, cover up the site they’d started digging, for the night.
AG: Actually we’re not really that cautious because we thought that the local people, who used to watch us during the day...would protect that. We’re doing archeology and we’re doing lectures in the schools.
NA: But, then…
AG: The next day when we returned, somebody did the excavation and they removed the ceramics. So, from then on I started to gauge, to have the sense of time. We really need to estimate whether we can still finish or not.
NA: So basically, as soon as they see hints of a new layer of bones - if it’s close to 4 or 5 pm, at the end of their day – they realized that it was safer to leave the site undisturbed for the night. Because once you start working on it, you can’t really go back. You gotta keep those bones and artifacts away from extreme exposure to harsh winds or humidity. Then, the illustrators and photographers they have on the team have to document where everything is in relation to the skeletons and other markers that they’ve found. So, you have to actually do the work of carefully excavating these items that are hundreds of years old.
AG: So, it’s better if you have the whole day, the whole time to do it. Then at five o’clock you have this peace of mind that you don’t worry that other people might be doing “archeology” at night...whoever has this negative feeling about archeology. So it happens, always.
NA: I could say it breaks my heart to hear that, but in reality, I prefer being optimistic. The core of the problem is that locals see this group of scientists digging about their land. Maybe they don’t fully understand what people find so interesting in a pile of bones. But what they do know is that sometimes, these digs unearth pottery, and they know how to make money from that, in some way.
28:11 Challenge #2: On rituals and religion
AG: When it comes to burial, it’s very sensitive. You need to be an anthropologist. You need to observe if they have some rituals that they perform for burying their loved ones.
Even though I am a Christian, I am a Methodist, in my faith - we pray. In other communities, in other ethnic groups, they have their own ways di ba (don’t they) of remembering the dead.
NA: So in every community that they visit for a dig…
AG: I ask somebody to pray, like a shaman. I will ask if someone can lead us, so in that way, we are making ourselves visible to the community, in a way trying to adopt in their practices.
NA: They provide offerings of food, sometimes cigarettes and liquor…
AG: And after that, once we do the excavation, I always invite people to visit us.
NA: They found it’s a way of educating people, and…
AG: Telling them that we’re trying to recover it carefully, not to destroy it, because we need to study them. And after, they will be brought to the museum for proper storage. Prior to that, we will try to study them first and hear if they have other things to tell us beyond the historical aspect. Nobody can tell us unless we try to dig it. So, that’s the only way we will know how our ancestors lived during those times.
NA: To many of us, that probably sounds a little archaic, but it’s a reality that researchers like Dr. Garong face, working in remote and deeply rural communities in the Philippines.
And this leads into…
30:33 Challenge #3: A lack of knowledge and involvement
AG: The community, they’re always there in their community. But the National Museum only goes there for a month. After that we will go back to our office. But it’s the community who will protect whatever heritage we can tell them that they have.
NA: I just want to add here that “telling locals of the heritage they have” in this context, means explaining how and why archeology is important, why it matters. For Dr. Garong and her team, who work with a respect for local communities front and center, it’s not about “stamping out” beliefs or even falsifying an ideology that’s been in place for hundreds of years.
When outsiders come in to make changes or propose a new way of doing things, naturally they’re met with resistance, and that’s common anyplace in the world. The study of anthropology in itself, deals so much with this really complex way that humans behave.
But what’s important is getting locals on board with that basic need to keep these kinds of sites undisturbed. This kind of involvement…
AG: We’re protecting the cultural aspect. It’s really important also. So they should know and they should also be informed that they should not ruin it or do something bad. Instead, they have to really protect it, kasi (because) it’s part of our heritage, and that’s the only way we will know our past.
NA: And with this approach, Dr. Garong hopes that…
AG: The community will understand and be familiar with what we are doing. They can also report to us if they’ve seen those materials already, and we can check and we can explore. So, it will also add information for the National Museum.
NA: …and by extension, the body of knowledge in Philippine archeology as a whole.
32:56 What’s next?
NA: “So, what’s next?” I asked Dr. Garong.
AG: Actually, Nastasha, it’s my dream to continue the isotopic analysis and to reveal more of the resources.
NA: In addition to building a body of research on ancient Filipinos and how they lived, this stable isotopic analysis…
AG: It can also reveal environmental situations or conditions.
NA: …in other words, it gives us information about what the country’s climate and geography used to be like. And combined with modern day research, this helps scientists better understand how to tackle the big questions that we face today, like how climate change affects farming, fishing, and everyday life in the Philippines.
AG: Hopefully I can still continue doing this in the future. There are still other sites that can be explored with this kind of research. At the moment, I’m still working with other burial sites in Negros and still working, with understanding the funerary practice in the Philippines during prehistoric times.
There’s still a lot to study about the practices of burying our loved ones and other analysis that can be done, like ancient DNA, that’s also one of my dreams.
NA: And working on ancient DNA, I just discovered, is an actual thing.
WRAP-UP
My warmest thanks to Dr. Ame Garong for speaking with us for this interview and answering all the questions I had about the Ancient Filipino Diet. I hope you learned as much as I did in the process of researching for this episode.
Music for this episode is by David Szestay, that’s his music you hear in the opening and closing credits of the show, “Gillicuddy” and “Blue Dot Sessions.” Visit fma.org to hear from these artists and more.
My special thanks to Rajiv at “The Kitchen Bookstore” for connecting me with Dr. Garong. If you’d like to get a copy of “Ancient Filipino Diet,” visit www.thekitchenbookstore.com and head over to their Filipiniana section to order. They’ve got some amazing titles.
Finally, if you’ve come this far, I do wanna ask you a favor. I would really, really appreciate a short review on iTunes. That helps me reach more listeners and in turn, gets more people get to hear about these awesome stories of food in and from the Philippines.
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See you next month at maraming salamat - thank you, for listening.