Description
Gastronomic Expressions of Our City “ILOILO” Nature, Culture, and Geography
Editor: Michaela Fenix
I wrote a chapter for an Internationally released volume Mata-Codesal and Abranches, Food Parcels in International Migration, 2017. The title of the chapter was "When objects speak louder than words: food, intimacy, and power in the contemporary transnational household." My interest in food and culture was clearly shaped by the ideas I engaged with opened the chapter with a note on how the late Filipino (and longga) food scholar Doreen Gamboa Fernandez thought of food as "an accessible point of entry into Philippine culture and history" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on Fernandez 2003, 58).
Fernandez herself thought of food as a means of acquiring a sense of identity. As an aspect of everyday life, it serves as a mirror we could hold up to ourselves, "[offering] an opportunity for self-knowledge ... grounded in immediate experience, embodied knowledge, and personal and collective memory" (60). To a group of llonggo OFWs in Hong Kong sharing a meal of pinamarhan and steamed rice, food is not just sustenance. It is a potent and intimate way to experience home (and llonggo- ness) in a foreign place.
Another food scholar, Donna Gabaccia (1998), has called attention to "the symbolic power of food to reflect cultural or social affinities in moments of change or transformation" (9). Yet, she also reminds us that, historically, "the production, exchange, marketing, and consumption of food has [also] generated new identities--for foods and eaters alike" (5). One can imagine, for instance, the role that brands like Starbucks or Cadbury play in articulating and shaping Filipino middle-class aspirations. Implicit in these understandings of food is the central idea that food serves as the "nonverbal medium for the human creative faculty" (see Douglas and Isherwood 1979 37, 41) and that, indeed, food is expressive and generative of culture.
Food, like other material objects, have "social lives" (see Appadurai 1986), and doing their biographies by examining how they are culturally understood and/or put to use, or focusing on their journeys from raw ingredients, to preparation or production, through exchange/distribution, to consumption can deepen our understanding of the societies within which they are embedded. A bowl of batchoy is not just noodles, spices, and cheap animal bits-- its broth is also thickened by stories about our relationship with Chinese immigrants, our historical ties to Mexico and the New World, and the everyday lives of the toiling masses. Its emergence in a public market and not the kitchens of the local elite speaks volumes about its democratic character. Food makes possible our sensorial communion with culture and history.
-Clement Q Camposano Chancellor, UP Visayas
Size: 8.5 x 11 inches
Pages: 244
Copyright 2024
Vibal Group Inc & Iloilo Festivals Foundation, Inc.
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