Eat your national heroes

We writers enjoy doing a lot of pointless stuff, like belabor what is already obvious. Take that previous sentence, for example, or my next statement, which is this: Filipinos love to eat.

Neighbors will outdo each other just to satisfy dinner guests, especially during fiesta. Your neighbor is serving crackling liempo with bagoong balayan? Go get a whole suckling pig for lechon! They’re preparing beef tapa? Quick! Roast a calf! Never mind if you incur huge debts in the process -- that’s okay, so long as the guests go home with tummies bursting. When President George Dubya visited our country, local media reporters spent several days discussing (and debating) the dinner menu in Malacañang. Either we love food so much or the State Visit was that bland and our reporters only had the menu to talk about.

Food is so embedded in our lives that a lot of our metaphors and idiomatic expressions are based on food. We are nakikisawsaw when we join a group of people doing something. We are uhaw sa atensyon or binubusog ng pag-ibig. When a deal smells fishy we call it lutong macau. If that same deal leads to questionable results, we’ll call it panis. In the 1980s, we signaled dissatisfaction by making the universal “up yours” sign but we gave it a local name: the ngatngat sign. When people or events gang up on you, you’re lutung-luto na.

Our ex-future president and Da King Fernando Poe Jr. made popular the favorite phrase for people who’ve had enough: Kapag puno na ang salop. For those of you who’ve never used, or, much less seen a salop, it’s that square box that rice vendors use to measure rice. The vendor would keep pouring rice into the salop until it’s heaping with it. Then they level the heap by passing a wooden stick to the brim. The whole saying is “Kapag puno na ang salop, kailangan nang kayusin.”

Then when we’re angry we say naghalo na ang balat sa tinalupan. Try translating that in English and you’ll end up groping for a word for tinalupan! And don’t forget what the oldies would always preach to us: ang pag-aasawa ay hindi kaning mainit na iluluwa kapag napaso. I think that’s one of the best, shortest and crispest lessons ever phrased about marriage.

Of course, all other cultures use food and eating to express themselves, too. But Filipinos take the cake, if you know what I mean. Here’s more proof. Rice is just rice to other nations. But for Filipinos, it’s gotta be palay, then bigas and finally, kanin when boiled. It transforms into sinangag the next morning. Compare this to the names Americans use for rice: unhusked rice, uncooked rice, cooked rice (or steamed rice) and fried rice. How creative.

We even have a name for that sticky goo water turns into as you boil it with rice. It’s called am, and back in Pampanga where I obviously come from (it’s the surname, stupid), we sometimes put the am into a cup and sweeten it with sugar to make a nice pre-dinner snack. My mother swears by the medicinal powers of am.

Speaking of Pampanga, famous for its great cooks (and also for the boastfulness of its people, so they say, which to me is baseless), I think it’s the only province that has a term for this quirk: when you eat adobo, for example, and you pour its sabaw into the kanin—what do you call that action? I asked my friends from a handful of provinces and all they came up with is the verb sinasabawan. Kapampangans have a different term for sabaw and the act of adding it to rice. We call sabaw as sabo while the act is called manambula.

While we’re at it, I find it hard to use the word “sauce” to translate sabaw. You’ll agree that it doesn’t quite capture the meaning of sabaw.

What I’m trying to belabor here is that we gain a bit of insight by looking at the way people eat, and by comparing it with other cultures. Take the French, for example, who are also fond of food. They like it subtle. Their typical dinner is like a stripping act, slowly progressing from teaser to climax: hors d'oeuvres and some pre-dinner drinks (called aperitif), then follows a procession of courses so long you’d think you deserve a college degree after dinner.

In comparison, we just pile up on the table all the dishes we prepared, and let the guests help themselves! Sure, there are some families who serve dinner in courses – but these most probably inherited their tradition from the Spanish.

Because they don’t have rice, the French, and Europeans in general, like their ulam less tasty. Now there’s another difference. To Westerners, a meal is a meal and we consider it weird if they eat adobo by itself, without rice. To us, a meal should have kanin and ulam or you’re just nagpapapak. I think this is why our viands are tastier – because, we compensate for the thinner taste when we mix an ulam with rice. This may explain why their taste is “subtle” while we like it really tasty.

What’s the ultimate proof that we love eating? Eating is so important to us that we honor our heroes by naming food after them. After Ninoy Aquino’s assassination, one carenderia in Quezon Avenue named itself “Goto Ninoy”. And of course there’s that fish called lapu-lapu. Now I did my usual research (10 seconds in Google and my internet was down) into this topic but it’s still not clear whether the fish was named after the hero or vice versa. But I strongly doubt that someone would actually name their kid after a mean-looking fish. In any case, eating lapu-lapu to honor a hero sounds as far-fetched as the thought of Americans eating a nice plate of basted washington with cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving. You can’t beat that!