Class photo

(Photo from Amy Besa’s Facebook).

Thanks to Amy Besa’s class (part of ACF’s Symposium on Filipino food in San Francisco), I learned a few new (albeit obvious) things about Filipino cuisine:

1. Filipino food was founded on an insular diet of marine life, flavored with salt from the sea and citrus/sour fruits and plant life on land.
2. The “holy triumvirate” of Filipino food, which utilizes the above ingredients, consists of: Kinilaw, Adobo (don’t know what it was called before the Mexican/Spanish influence), and Sinigang.
3. The name of the province of Pangasinan practically means “from the salt.”
4. Last but not least, using Filipino food to educate the global community about Filipino culture.

Number 4 was important, that a culture’s cuisine is its greatest ambassador and tour guide. At the very least, it is a perfect (and tasty) introduction!

Indian curry, Italian gelato, Japanese sashimi, Ethiopian kitfo, Filipino ube, binagoongang rice, and breakfast silogs… are all items I can’t wait to tell people about.

With the help of immigrant families (and now the internet) Filipino food lands on the plates of homes and restaurants in far and distant countries. Food can be historians too, holding within each unique dish centuries of tradition that even contemporary chefs do not see in between the lines of their recipe books. Turns out that many rice farmers in the Philippines are growing rice whose DNA has remained unchanged for thousands of years!

Now go and visit your local Filipino restaurant. And bring a friend or 5. What good is word of mouth advertising if it isn’t eating culture in the first place?!