HUM116: FOOD & TRAVEL WRITING

Show! Don’t tell.

Descriptive Imagery

Basically, it is the way the writer paints the scene, or

image, in the mind of the reader. It usually involves
descriptions of one or more of the five senses.

Imagine you are describing a lemon to someone who has

never seen one before. How would you describe it using
all five senses?

• Sight
• Sound
• Smell
• Touch
• Taste

Telling Showing
I went to the lake. It was cool. My breath escaped in ragged bursts, my
quadriceps burning as I crested the summit. The
lake stretched before me, aquamarine, glistening in
the hot August afternoon sun. Ponderosa pines
lined its shores, dropping their spicy-scented
needles into the clear water. Despite the heat, the
Montana mountain air tasted crisp.

Scene and Summary.

One of the most important techniques of creative nonfiction is writing in scenes. A scene recreates the
experience of the writer for the reader. A scene evokes. A scene often includes:

Setting-time and place of the story

Action-something happens.
Dialogue-someone something not always
Vivid description-concrete and specific details.
Imagery-language that invokes the reader’s sense of sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing
Point of View-first, second, third person.
Figurative language, such as simile and metaphor.
Beginning, middle, and the ending-A scene has a beginning, middle, and end

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Charles Baudelaire
The Painter of Modern Life (Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne) excerpt

I. Beauty, Fashion and Happiness

There are people in this world, even the world
of artists, who go to the Louvre, pass, swiftly, before a
host of paintings, full of interest though of a lower
order, without giving them a glance, and plant
themselves in reverie before a Titian or a Raphael, one
of those popularised by the art of the engraver; then
depart, satisfied, more than one saying ‘I know my
Louvre,’ just as there are others who once having read
Bossuet and Racine think they comprehend the history
of literature. Meeting in the Park’ - Constantin Guys (French, 1802 – 1892)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Happily, righters of wrongs, critics, amateurs, the curious, appear from time to time to affirm that
Raphael is not everything, Racine is not everything, that the minor poets contain things which are good, solid,
pleasurable; and finally that however much we admire beauty in general, as expressed by the classical poets and
artists, we are no less wrong in neglecting specific beauty, the beauty of circumstance and the play of manners.

I have to say that, for some years now, the world has shown itself somewhat improved in this respect.
The value that amateur collectors attach these days to the pleasant coloured engravings of the last century
proves that a much-needed reaction in public taste has occurred; Debucourt, the brothers Saint-Aubin, and
many others have been entered in the dictionary of artists worthy of study. Yet they represent the past; it is to
the painting of modern manners that I wish to address myself today. The past is interesting not only for the
beauty extracted from it by those artists for whom it was their present, but also, being past, for its historical
value. It is the same with the present. The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due not
merely to the beauty with which it can be invested but also to its essential quality of being present.

I have before my eyes a series of fashion plates, commencing with the Revolution and ending, more or
less, with the Consulate. Those modes of dress which appear ridiculous to unreflective people, serious people
without true seriousness, have a dual charm, both artistic and historical. They are often very fine, and executed
with spirit, but what to me is every bit as important, and what I am pleased to find in all or almost of them, is the
morality and aesthetic of their age. The idea of beauty Humanity creates for itself, imprints itself on all its attire,
rumples or stiffens its clothing, rounds out or aligns its gestures, and even, in the end, penetrates, subtly, its
facial features. Humanity ends by resembling that which it aspires to be. Those engraved forms can be viewed as
works of beauty or ugliness, of ugliness as caricatures, of beauty as ancient statues.

The women dressed in those costumes resembled one or the other, to a greater or lesser degree,
according that is to the degree of poetry or vulgarity by which they were marked. Living flesh rendered flowing
what to us seems too rigid. The spectator’s imagination can even today impart a stir or rustle to this tunic and
that shawl. One day, perhaps, a play will be performed in some theatre, in which we shall see the resurrection of
those costumes dressed in which our ancestors found themselves every bit as enchanting as we ourselves in our
poor garments (which possess their own grace, in truth, but rather of a moral and spiritual nature), and if they
are then worn and brought to life by intelligent actors and actresses we will be astonished that we mocked them
so foolishly. The past, without losing a pleasing air of fantasy, will recover the light and movement of life, and
become the present.

If an impartial person were to leaf through in turn all the modes of fashion from the first age of France
to the present day, they would find nothing to shock or surprise. The transitions would be as abundantly
evidenced as they are in the ranks of the animal kingdom. Not a single gap, thus, not a single surprise. And if to
the vignette representing each epoch were added the philosophical thought with which it was most occupied,
and by which it was most agitated, the memory of which thought the vignette inevitably invokes, it would be
seen that a profound harmony reigns in all the elements of its history, and that even in those centuries that
seem to us the most monstrous and insane, the undying appetite for beauty, has always found its satisfaction.

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 This grants us a fine opportunity, in fact, to establish a rational and historically-grounded theory of
beauty, as opposed to the theory of a unique and absolute beauty; to demonstrate that beauty is always,
inevitably, of a dual composition, even though the impression it produces is unified; for the difficulty of
discerning the varying elements of beauty within the unity of impression in no way obviates the need for variety
in its composition. Beauty is formed of an eternal and invariable element which is exceedingly difficult to
quantify, and a relative and circumstantial element which will embody, if you like, aspect by aspect or all at
once, the epoch, its manners, its morality, its passion. Without this second element which is like the delightful,
seductive, appetising icing on the divine cake, the first element would be indigestible, beyond our appreciation,
neither adapted nor suited to human nature. I defy anyone to reveal a single instance of beauty that does not
contain these two elements.

I shall select, if you wish, two extreme instances in our history. In hieratic art the duality is visible at first
glance; the element of eternal beauty only reveals itself with the permission and under the rule of the religion to
which the artist adheres. In the most frivolous work of a refined artist, belonging to one of those epochs which
we denote, in our immense vanity, as civilised, the duality is equally revealed; the eternal element of beauty will
be, at the same time, hidden and expressed, if not by the fashion of the age, at least by the particular
temperament of the artist. The duality of art is a fatal consequence of the duality of humankind. Consider, if you
will, that the eternal element exists as the soul of art, and the variable element as its body. That is why Stendhal,
an impertinent spirit, teasing, repugnant even, but one whose impertinences are a useful spur to reflection,
approached the truth more closely than many another, in saying: ‘Beauty is no more than the promise of
happiness.’ Doubtless that definition overshoots the mark. It renders beauty excessively subject to the infinitely
variable ideal of happiness. It strips beauty too readily of its aristocratic quality; but it possesses the great merit
of separating itself decisively from the errors of the academicians.

I have explained these things more than once before; these lines will have said enough on the subject, for those
who enjoy these diversions of abstract thought. But I know that my French audience have, for the most part,
little taste for these, and I myself am impatient to embark upon the positive and substantial elements of my
subject.

II. The Portrayal of Manners.

For the portrayal of manners, the representation of

bourgeois life, and the spectacle of fashion, the most
expeditious and least costly means are evidently the best. The
more beauty the artist instils in it, the more precious will be his
work; but there is in the trivialities of life, in the daily
metamorphosis of external things, a rapid movement that
demands from the artist an equal speed of execution. The multi-
coloured engravings of the eighteenth century have once more
attracted the attention of the fashionable, as I was saying but
now; pastels, etchings, aquatints have, one by one, contributed
their contingents to that immense dictionary of modern life
distributed throughout the libraries, among the portfolios of
collectors, and behind the windows of the meanest of shops. And then lithography appeared, instantly showing
itself as most aptly suited to this enormous task, so trivial at first sight. We have some veritable monuments in
this genre. The works of Gavarni and Daumier have rightly been named as complementary to the Comédie
Humaine. Balzac himself, I am more than convinced, was not far from adopting this idea, which is all the more
valid, in that the genius of the painter of manners is of a mixed nature, that is say one into which there enters a
strong element of the literary spirit. Observer, flâneur (saunterer), philosopher; call such a one what you will,
you will certainly be led, in characterising this artist, to employ an epithet that you would not apply to the
painter of eternal, or at least more long-lasting subjects, those of a heroic or religious nature. Sometimes he is a
poet, more often he is closer to being a novelist or moralist; he is the painter of the circumstantial, and all which
it suggests of the eternal. Every country, to its delight and glory, has possessed such artists. To Daumier and
Gavarni, in our present epoch, being the first names that come to mind, one may add Devéria, Maurin, and
Numa, historians of the more questionable charms of the Restoration, Wattier, Tassaert, and Eugène Lami, the
latter almost English in his love of aristocratic elegance, and even Trimolet and Traviès, those chroniclers of
poverty and the humble life

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III. The Artist: A Denizen of the World, a Denizen of the Crowd, yet a
Child

Today I would like to tell the public about a singular man, of an originality
so decided and powerful that it is sufficient to itself and requires no approbation.
Not one of his drawings is signed, if by a signature you mean the few, readily
imitated, letters that spell a name, and which so many other artists add,
ostentatiously, to the base of their most trivial sketches. But all his works are
signed with his brilliant spirit, and collectors, having viewed and appreciated them,
easily recognise them from the description I am about to give. A great lover of
crowds and incognitos, Monsieur C.G. (Constantin Guys) takes originality to the furthest point of modesty. Mr.
Thackeray, who, as is known, is deeply interested in works of art, and who himself designs the illustrations for
his novels, mentioned Monsieur G. one day in a lesser-known London journal. This enraged him, as though it
were an attack upon his virtue. More recently, when he learnt that I intended to pen an appreciation of his spirit
and talent, he begged me, in a most imperious manner, to suppress his name, and to speak of his works as if
they came from an anonymous hand. I shall bow, humbly, to this strange request. We shall feign to believe, the
reader and I, that Monsieur G does not exist, and concern ourselves with his drawings and watercolours, for
which he professes a patrician disdain, as do those scholars who pass judgement on rare historical documents,
preserved by chance, whose authors remain eternally unknown. We will even suppose, to satisfy my conscience
completely, that all I have to say regarding his nature, so strangely and mysteriously brilliant, is more or less
genuinely suggested by the works in question; pure poetical hypothesis, conjecture, the work of my imagination.

Monsieur G. is old. Rousseau, it is said, started writing at forty-two years of age. It was at about that age,
perhaps, that Monsieur G. obsessed with all the images crowding his brain, had the audacity to fling ink and
colour onto a blank sheet of paper. To tell the truth, he drew like a barbarian, like a child, impatient with the
clumsiness of his fingers, and the disobedience of his implement. I have viewed a large number of these
primitive barbarous scribbles, and I declare that the majority of those who understand, or pretend to
understand art, are blameless for not having divined the latent genius inhabiting those shadowy preliminaries.
Today, Monsieur G. who has discovered, by his own sole efforts, all the little tricks of his trade, and who has
undertaken, without guidance, his own education, has become a powerful master, in his own manner, and has
retained of his own initial artlessness only that which was needed to add an unexpected seasoning to his rich
gifts. When he encounters one of these youthful attempts of his, he tears it to bits, or burns it, with a most
assuming display of embarrassment.

For ten years I desired to make Monsieur G’s acquaintance, who is, by nature, a great traveller and
cosmopolitan. I knew he had long been employed by an English illustrated journal, and that he had published
therein engravings of his travel-sketches (done in Spain, Turkey, the Crimea). Since then I have seen a
considerable quantity of such drawings, improvised in those same places, and thus been able to read a minutely
detailed account of the Crimean campaign, preferable indeed to any other. The same journal also published
numerous compositions by the same hand, always unsigned, depicting new ballets and operas. When, at last, I
met him, I saw at once that I had to do not with an artist exactly, but rather a denizen of the world. Understand
here, I beg you, the term artist in a very restricted sense, and the term denizen of the world in a very broad one.
Denizen of the world, that is to say denizen of the whole world, one who understands the world and the
mysterious and legitimate reasons for its many behaviours; artist, that is but to say specialist, a man attached to
his palette as a serf is to the soil. Monsieur G. does not like to be called an artist. Is he not right, in a sense? He is
interested in the whole world; he wishes to know, understand, appreciate all that takes place on the surface of
our globe. The artist lives little of his life in the world of politics and morals. He who lives in the Breda quarter
ignores what comes to pass in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Save for two or three exceptions, whom it is
pointless to name, most artists are, it must be said, highly-skilled brutes, mere artisans, village intellects with the
brains of peasants. Their conversation, necessarily limited to a very small circle, proves quickly unbearable to the
denizen of the world; in spirit, a citizen of the universe.

Thus, to enter into an understanding of Monsieur G. take note, at once, of this: that curiosity may be
considered the starting-point for his genius.

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 Do you recall a picture (it is a picture, in truth!), drawn by the most powerful pen of this era (that of
Edgar Allan Poe), which has for its title ‘The Man of the Crowd’? Behind a café window, a convalescent,
contemplating the crowd with pleasure, mingles, in thought, with all the thoughts stirring about him. Recently
returned from death’s shadow, he breathes in, with delight, all the essences and odours of life; since he has
been on the point of total oblivion, he remembers and wishes, ardently, to remember everything. Finally, he
flings himself into the crowd, in pursuit of some unknown, whose physiognomy, glimpsed in the blink of an eye,
has bewitched him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion!

Imagine an artist who was always, spiritually, in that convalescent’s state, and you will hold the key to
Monsieur G’s character.

Now, convalescence is like a return to childhood. The convalescent, like the child, enjoys, in the highest
degree, the ability to interest himself keenly in things, even those which appear the most trivial. Let us return, if
possible, by means of a retrospective effort of the imagination, to our earliest, most youthful impressions, and
we will recall that they had a singular relationship to those impressions, so vividly coloured, which we later
received following a physical illness, provided that illness left our mental faculties pure and intact. The child sees
everything as novelty; he is forever intoxicated. Nothing more closely resembles what we call inspiration than
the joy with which a child absorbs form and colour. I dare to go further; I affirm that inspiration is somewhat
akin to convulsion, and that every sublime thought is accompanied by a nervous shock, more or less violent in
nature, which strikes the deepest part of the brain. The man of genius has strong nerves; those of the child are
weak. In the former, reason occupies a significant place; in the latter, sensibility occupies almost the whole
being. But genius is simply childhood recovered at will, a childhood now equipped for self-expression, with
mature faculties and an analytic spirit which permit him to set in order the mass of raw material he has
involuntarily accumulated. It is to this profound and joyous curiosity that one must attribute the fixed and
animalistically ecstatic gaze of children confronted by the new, whatever it might be, a face or a landscape, light,
gilding, colour, lustrous materials, or the enchantment of beauty enhanced by cosmetics. One of my friends told
me that, when he was a small child, he was often present when his father dressed himself, and that, with a
mixture of amazement and delight, he would contemplate the muscular arms, the transitions of colour in the
pink and yellow tints of the skin, and the bluish network of veins. The tableau of external life, had already filled
him with awe, and seized his brain. Already, form obsessed and possessed him. Destiny had already revealed,
precociously, the tip of its nose. His damnation was certain. Need I add that the child is today a celebrated
painter?

I begged you, a moment ago, to consider Monsieur G. as an eternal convalescent; to complete your
conception of him, consider him also as a man-child, a man possessed at each instant with the genius of infancy,
that is to say a genius for whom no aspect of life has been rendered dull.

I have said that I was reluctant to call him simply an artist, and that he himself declined that title, with a
modesty touched with aristocratic reserve. I would willingly name him a dandy, and own to several good reasons
for that; since the word dandy implies a quintessence of character and a subtle understanding of the whole
moral mechanism of this world; yet on the other hand the dandy aspires to insensitivity, and it is in this that
Monsieur G. dominated himself by an insatiable passion, that of seeing and feeling, parts company, forcefully,
from dandyism.

‘Amabam amare: I love to love’, said Saint Augustine. ‘I love passion, passionately’ Monsieur G. might
choose to say. The dandy is blasé, or pretends to be so, for reasons of policy and caste. Monsieur G. has a horror
of blasé people. He is a master of that most difficult art (refined spirits will comprehend me) of being sincere
without appearing ridiculous. I would happily award him the title of philosopher, to which he has more than one
right, if his excessive love of things visible, tangible, condensed to their plastic state, did not inspire in him a
certain repugnance to all that forms the impalpable realm of the metaphysician. Let us be content to consider
him then as a purely pictorial moralist, akin to La Bruyère.

The crowd is his domain, as the air is that of the birds, and the water the fishes. His passion, and
profession, is to espouse the crowd. For the perfect flâneur (saunterer), for the passionate observer, it is an
immense joy to take up one’s dwelling among the multitude, amidst undulation, movement, the fugitive, the
infinite. To be absent from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home; to view the world, to be at the heart
of the world, and yet hidden from the world, such are some of the least pleasures of those independent spirits,
passionate and impartial, that language can only inadequately define. The spectator is a prince who rejoices

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everywhere in his incognito. The lover of life makes the world his family, like the lover of the fair sex who makes
a family from all those beauties found, or to be found, or never to be found; or, like the picture-lover, lives in the
enchanted company of dreams painted on canvas. Thus, the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as into
an immense reservoir of electrical energy. One might compare him, also, to a mirror, immense as that crowd; to
a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness which, with its every movement, conveys the multiplicity of life,
and the grace in motion of every element of that life. He is an ‘I’, insatiable in his appetite for the ‘not-I’, who at
every instance renders it, and expresses it in images more vibrant than life itself, which is forever unstable and
fugitive. ‘Any man’, Monsieur G. said one day, in the midst of one of those conversations which he illuminates
with intense gaze and evocative gesture, ‘any man, not crushed by one of those sorrows so great as to rob him
of all his faculties, who can be bored at the heart of a multitude is an idiot! An idiot! And one whom I despise!’

When Monsieur G. on waking opens his eyes to see the sun making its assault, beating on his window-pane, he
cries, remorsefully and regretfully: ‘What an imperious command! What a fanfare of light! Several hours of light,
everywhere, already gone! Light, lost to my sleep! How many brightly-lit things I might have seen that I have
failed to see! And he goes out! And he watches the river of life in its flow, so majestic, so brilliant. He admires
the eternal beauty and the amazing harmony of life in capital cities, a harmony so providentially maintained
amidst the tumult of human liberty. He contemplates the landscapes of the great metropolis, landscapes of
stone, caressed by the fog, or struck by gusts of sunlight. He delights in fine carriages, proud horses, the dazzling
smartness of the grooms, the dexterity of the footmen, the flowing movement of the women, the beautiful
children, happy to be alive and finely-dressed; in a word, in universal life. If a fashion, the cut of a garment, has
been slightly altered, if ribbon in bows, if curls have been dethroned by cockades, if the bavolet (the neck-
hanging at the back of a bonnet) has been enlarged, if the chignon (a coil of hair at the back of the head) is a
fraction nearer the nape of the neck, if the waist is raised, the skirt fuller, believe that his eagle eye will already
have divined it, from an enormous distance. A regiment passes by, on its way perhaps to the ends of the earth,
sending into the air of the boulevards its fanfares, as light and lively, as hope; and behold, the eye of Monsieur
G. has already inspected the arms, the allure, the physiognomy of that troop. Glittering harnesses, determined
glances, heavy solemn moustaches, all this enters into him, pell-mell; and in a few moments the resulting poem
is virtually composed. Behold how his soul is alive with the soul of that regiment marching like a single creature,
a proud image of joy in obedience!

But now evening has fallen. It is that strange and uncertain hour when the curtains of the heavens are drawn
and the cities are illumined. The gas-light stains the purple of sunset. Honest or dishonest, rational or mad, all
say to themselves: ‘At last, the day is done!’ The wicked and the wise think of pleasure, and each hastens to
their chosen place to drink the cup of forgetfulness. Monsieur G. will be the last to linger, wherever may be a
gleam of light, an echo of poetry, a tremor of life, a vibration of music; wherever a passion may pose for his eye,
wherever the natural and the conventional reveal themselves in a peculiar beauty, wherever the sun lights the
brief joys of the depraved creature! ‘Behold, a day well-employed, indeed!’ a certain reader, whom we all know,
remarks to himself ‘every one of us has sufficient genius to fill his day in the same fashion.’ No! Few are gifted
with the ability to see; even fewer possess the power of expression. Now, at a time when others sleep, he is
bowed over his table, darting the same look at a sheet of paper he directed a moment ago towards external
things, skirmishing with his crayon, his pen, his
brush, splashing his glass of water towards the
ceiling, wiping his pen on his shirt, urgent,
violent, active, as if he fears the images might
escape him, contentious though alone, elbowing
himself on. And those external things are reborn
on paper, lifelike and more than lifelike, beautiful
and more than beautiful, singular and endowed
with the liveliness of their creator’s soul. The
phantasmagoria has been drawn from nature. All
the material that the memory has burdened
itself with is ranked, arranged, harmonised, and
subjected to that imposed idealisation which is
the result of a childlike perception, that is to say
an intense and magical perception, by reason of
its innocence!

Source: Baudelaire, Charles (1821–1867) - The painter of modern life (Le Peintre de la vie Moderne). (n.d.). Poetry In Translation | A. S. Kline's Open Access
Poetry Archive. https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/BaudelaireThePainterOfModernLife.php

HUM116_ATGIRON_AY2021-2022
Travel writing is writing about visiting different places. It can appear as a newspaper article, informing
readers about a specific destination. It can also be a form of literary non-fiction, written as a book, telling a
longer narrative about a journey or place. This differs from a travel blog because the writing is more detailed
and less informal.

Travel writing:
• is usually written in the first person – using ‘I’
• is often descriptive – telling you about the place
• as literary non-fiction, is aiming to entertain as well as inform

Source: Travel writing - non-fiction text types - GCSE English language revision - Other - BBC bitesize. (n.d.). BBC Bitesize. https://www.bbc.co.uk

Where’s the Patis by Carmen Guerrero Nakpil.

Travel has become the great Filipino dream. In the same
way that an American dreams of becoming a millionaire
or an English boy dreams of going to one of the great
universities, the Filipino dreams of going abroad. His
most constant vision is that of himself as a tourist.

To visit Hongkong, Tokyo and other cities of Asia,

perchance, to catch a glimpse of Rome, Paris, or London
and to go to Ameri-ca (even if only for a week in a fly-
specked motel in California) is the sum of all delights.
Yet having left the Manila International Airport in a pink cloud of despedidas and sampaguita garlands and
pabilin, the dream turns into a nightmare very quickly. But why? Because the first bastion of the Filipino spirit is
the palate. And in all the palaces and fleshpots and skyscrapers of that magic world called "abroad," there is no
patis to be had.

Consider the Pinoy abroad. He has discarded barong tagalong or "polo" for a sleek, dark Western suit. He takes
to the habiliments from Hongkong, Brooks Brothers, or Savile Row with the greatest of ease. He has also shed
the casual informality of manner that is characteristically Filipino. He gives himself the airs of a cosmopolite to
the credit-card born. He is extravagantly courteous (especially in a borrowed language) and has taken to hand-
kissing and to plenty of American "D'you minds?"

He hardly misses the heat, the native accents of Tagalog or Ilongo, or the company of his brown-skinned
cheerful compatriots. He takes, like a duck to water, to the skyscrapers, the temperate climate, the strange
landscape, and the fabled refinements of another world. How nice, after all, to be away from good old R.P. for a
change!

But as he sits down to a meal, no matter how sumptuous, his heart sinks. His stomach juices, he discovers, are
much less cosmopolitan than the rest of him. They are much less adaptable than his sartorial or social habits.
They have remained in that dear barrio in Bulacan or in that little town in Ilocos and nothing that is set on the
table before he can summon them to London or Paris.

There he is in the most expensive restaurant in Europe, surrounded by beautiful women and impeccably dressed
men bending over their rich meals. Waiters in black ties and tails stand at his elbow ready to cater to his smallest
wish. An array of glass silver, china, and artistic blooms is set before him. An elegant wagon of hors d’oeuvre
approaches: pink salmon from Scotland, golden English herring, sensuous anchovies from France, green salad
from a Belgian farm, mounds of Italian pasta, Russian caviar on ice, melon halves, stuffed eggs, shrimp
smothered in piquant red sauce.

At that moment the Pinoy is overcome with a yearning for a mound of white rice, a bowl of sinigang, and a little
saucer of patis. What would happen, he asks himself, if I shouted for sinigang na bangus? The thought perishes
as he catches sight of the world-weary hauteur on the face of the waiter. With a sigh, he applies himself to the
foreign delicacies. The herring, after a few mouthfuls, tastes almost like tinapa. The shrimp would be excellent if
he had some white sukang Iloko to soak it in but the melon is never half as good as the ones his wife buys from
her suki in San Andres.

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Now he must make another choice. The waiter, with an air of a prime minister approaching a concordat,
murmurs something about choosing a soup. The menu is in French, and to be safe our hero asks the waiter to
recommend the specialty of the house. A clear consomm? When it comes, the Pinoy discovers that it is merely
the kind of soup Filipinos sip when they are convalescing from “tifus” or “trancazo”. Tomato soup is almost an
emetic. Onion soup with bits of bread and cheese is too odd for words but palatable. If he is lucky, the waiter
brings bouillabaisse with a flourish. A French classic? Nonsense. We Filipinos invented it. It is sinigang, he tells
the astonished waiter, not only quite as good as we do it at home. And where, for heaven’s sake, is the patis?

The entrée or the main course is quite another problem. Poulet is chicken. Fillet de sole is fish, though
recognizable neither as apahap nor lapu-lapu. Tournedos is meat done in a barbarian way, thick and barely
cooked with red juices still oozing out. The safest choice is steak. If the Filipino can get it well done enough and
slice thinly enough, it might remind him of tapa.

If the waiter only knew enough about Philippine cuisine, he might suggest venison which is really something like
tapang usa, or escargots which the unstylish poor on Philippine beaches know as snails. Or even frog legs which
are a Pampango delight.

But this is the crux of the problem where is the rice? A sliver tray offers varieties of bread: slices of crusty French
bread, soft yellow rolls, rye bread, crescents studded with sesame seeds. There are also potatoes in every
conceivable manner, fried, mashed, boiled, buttered. But no rice.

The Pinoy learns that rice is considered a vegetable in Europe and America. The staff of life a vegetable!
And when it comes-- a special order which takes at least half an hour -- the grains are large, oval, and foreign-
looking and what's more, yellow with butter. And oh horrors! - one must shove it with a fork or pile it with one's
knife on the back of another fork.

After a few days of these debacles, the Pinoy, sick with longing, decides to comb the strange city for a Chinese
restaurant, the closest thing to the beloved gastronomic county. There, in the company of other Asian exiles, he
will put his nose final-ly in a bowl of rice and find it more fragrant than an English rose garden, more exciting
than a castle on the Rhine, and more delicious than pink champagne.

To go with the rice there is siopao (not so rich as at Salazar) pancit guisado reeking with garlic (but never so good
as any that can be had on the sidewalks of Quiapo) fried lumpia with the incorrect sauce, and even mami (but
nothing like the down-town wanton)

Better than a Chinese restaurant is the kitchen of a kababayan. When in a foreign city, a Pinoy searches every
busy side-walk, theatre, restaurant for the well-remembered golden features of a fellow-Pinoy. But make it no
mistake. It is only because he is in desperate need of a Filipino meal, and like a homing pigeon, he follows his
nose to a Filipino kitchen that is well-stocked with bagoong, garlic, balat ng lumpia, gabi leaves, and misua.

When the Pinoy finally finds such a treasure-house, he will have every meal
with his kababayan. Forgotten are the bistros and the smart restaurants.
The back of his hand to the Four Seasons and the Tour d’ Argent. Ah, the
regular orgies of cooking and eating that ensue. He may have never known
his host before. In Manila, if he saw him again, they would hardly exchange
two words. But here in this odd, barbarian land where people eat inedible
things and have never heard of patis, they are brothers forever.

A Filipino may denationalize himself but not his stomach. He may travel
over the seven seas and the five continents and the two hemispheres and
lose the savor of home and forget his identity and believe himself a citizen
of the world. But he remains—gastronomically, at least—always a Filipino.
For, if in no other way, the Filipino loves his country with his stomach.

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What is Food Writing?
Food writing encompasses more than snooty restaurant reviews or
poetic descriptions of the taste of wine, coffee, and chocolate. Food
writing can include memoirs, cultural critique, and scientific
explication. Topics writers might pursue include but are not limited to
food traditions, food taboos, food trends, fast food, slow food, junk
food, fad diets, eating disorders, food as medicine, food production,
agribusiness, organic and sustainable farming, and fishery, migrant
farm labor, restaurant work, food science, bioengineering of food,
food deserts, hunger, etc.
Source: Berkeley English 143N/1. (n.d.). Berkeley English.
https://english.berkeley.edu/courses/5595

Culture Ingested: Notes on the

Indigenization of Philippine Food
by Doreen G. Fernandez

In spite of his daily participation in its preparation and consumption, the Filipino is often hard put to say just
what Philippine food is. In his home and restaurant menus are found dishes with vernacular names like laing and
paklay, Spanish names like embutido and mechado, Chinese names like tokwa and bihon, and even Chinese food
with Spanish names, like camaron rebozado dorado con jamon— all companionably coexisting.

The reason for the confusion is that Philippine cuisine, dynamic as any live and growing phase of culture, has
changed through history, absorbing influences, indigenizing, adjusting to new technology and tastes, and thus
evolving.

Filipino food today as shaped by Philippine history and society consists of a Malay matrix, in which melded
influences from China and India (through trade), Arabia (through trade and Islamization), Spain and America
(through colonization), and more recently the rest of the world (through global communication).1 A special path
to the understanding of what Philippine food is can be taken by examining the process of indigenization which
brought in, adapted and then subsumed foreign influences into the culture.

“Eating,” Naomichi Ishige, a Japanese anthropologist, has said, “is the act of ingesting the environment.”2 It is
quite certainly also ingesting culture, since among the most visible, most discernible and most permanent traces
left by foreign cultures on Philippine life is food that is now part of the every-day, and often not recognized as
foreign, so thoroughly has it been absorbed into the native lifestyle.

This particular aspect of cultural borrowing and change bears investigation; not only are the results of
immediate and gut-level concern to every Filipino, but the process is one in which not only a few, but the
greater majority of Filipinos, participated. The process of borrowing went on in innumerable Philippine
households through many years. It was a conscious and yet unconscious cultural reaction, in that borrowers
knew that they were cooking foreign dishes while making necessary adaptations, but were not aware that they
were transforming the dish and making it their own. Pancit, for example, from a Chinese noodle dish, is now the
signature of many a town or region (pancit Malabon, pancit Marilao, pancit habhab of Lucban), and of many an
individual (pancit ni Aling Nena). That certainly shows that both evolution and creation have been involved.

The process seems to start with a foreign dish in its original form, brought in by foreigners (Chinese traders,
Spanish missionaries). It is then taught to a native cook, who naturally adapts it to the tastes he knows and the
ingredients he can get, thus both borrowing and adapting. Eventually, he improvises on it, thus creating a new
dish that in time becomes so entrenched in the native cuisine and lifestyle that its origins are practically for-
gotten. That is indigenization, and in the Philip-pines the process starts with a foreign element and ends with a
dish that can truly be called part of Philippine cuisine.

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Methodology
The principal difficulty in this investigation is methodology. The
evidence for this research is generally consumed, digested, and
transformed—and thus no longer available in archives, or for
carbon dating. Yet in a way, one can say that the evidence is
always being manufactured and dis-covered anew, every day, in
every meal in every home. Still, the work of one cook is not hard
and fast evidence and is fraught with variables and at best can only
indicate a pattern.

Secondly, to conventional research methods like documenting and

comparing variants, recording changes and seeking reasons for them, one must add critical and analytical
tasting—a process difficult to standardize and imprison in formulae. For this preliminary exploration, I have used
a method that combines examination of the dish as done in the original culture and as extant in Filipino cooking,
and then analyzed to determine the culture change or pattern discernible from this.

How then does one recognize these indigenized dishes on the Philippine table? Firstly by their names, since
these were often borrowed along with the dish. Siopao, for example, is a Hokkien borrowing that suggests the
cooking process, steaming, pao being steamed bread. Pancit, which comes from the Hokkien pian + e + sit is still
recognizably Chinese, although originally it did not necessarily mean a noodle dish. Gloria Chan-Yap tells us that
it literally means “something that is conveniently cooked” and indicates the frying process. Since noodles are
easy to prepare by frying, the word often, but not necessarily, means noodles. Pesa in Hokkien simply means
“‘plain boiled’ and it is used only in reference to the cooking of fish, the complete term in Hokkien being peq + sa
+ hi, the last morpheme meaning fish.”’ Chan-Yap cites this as an example of semantic “widening” since in
Tagalog pesa in isolation does mean fish, but can mean “boiled” when one says pesang manok. However, the
point remains: the names indicate the origin.3

Adobo is the noun derived from adobado, the name of a stewed meat dish in Mexico, from where Carmen
Guerrero-Nakpil says the Philip-pine adobo comes.4 In Spain, however, adobo is a pickling sauce, made by
cooking together olive oil, vinegar, garlic, thyme, laurel, oregano, paprika and salt. The Filipino has thus given
the name adobo to a particular dish of chicken or pork-and-chicken and derived from it an adjective to describe
other foods using the same or a similar cooking process (adobong pusit). The term ado-bado has moved from
the dish to the process of stewing in a spiced or flavored broth (e.g., “Ang itik sa Angono’y adobado na bago
prituhin”),5 thus using the basic meaning—to cook in a pick-ling sauce. And indeed Philippine adobo is ado-
bado, but in condiments chosen by the native taste: vinegar and garlic, bayleaf and peppercorns, and more
recently soy sauce, the Chinese contribution.

Some borrowings from Spanish are literal and do not undergo semantic shifts like the above: cocido, salpicon,
croquetas. Some are only portions of the original name, e.g. carne mechada (meat with a lardon) has become
mechado; gallina rellenada has become relleno, relleno in Spanish being the forcemeat with which one stuffs
the chicken. Especially interesting cases are dishes like Pescado en salsa agrio-dulce and morisqueta tostada,
which in spite of their Spanish names are really Chinese. These are panciteria dishes, which in the Spanish period
were translated into Spanish for printing on menus. The dishes entered the native kitchen from the panciteria
and so retain the Spanish names. Some of these menus survive in small panciterias, and although the years have
corrupted the spelling in amusing ways, the Spanish words cloak a Chinese dish which most Filipinos recognize
as Chinese, but now consider Filipino.

Semantic analysis of the names of food would thus reveal origin, something of the nature of the change and also
further information. For example, the Chan-Yap study finds that loanwords are fewest in the category of rice
products and fowl, and suggests that this may be because both rice and fowl had long been food sources for
Filipinos, who “already had in their possession the culinary words appropriate for describing referents” in these
categories. On the other hand, the fact that there are many loanwords for meat (goto, kamto, kasim, paykot,
liempo) suggests that the Tagalog people learned the habit of eating some meat cuts, especially pork, from the
Hokkien speakers and the habit of eating beef from the Spanish, since many of the terms for beef are Spanish
(punta y pecho, cadera, lomo, solomillo).

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Ingredients
The ingredients contained in the original dish, and those in the local edition, are also clues to the process of
indigenization. Noodles in Chinese cuisine, for example, are generally cooked with meat and vegetables to savor
the noodles. Filipino pancit has local meats and vegetables—and a few other things not found in Chinese
cooking at all. Pancit Malabon, being the signature noodle of a fishing town, has squid and oysters and salted
eggs, which individually may conceivably be found in a Chinese dish, but not in that combination. Pancit Marilao
has crumbled okoy of rice sour, since its home base, Bulacan, is rice-growing country; pancit palabok has flaked
tinapa and crumbled chicharron. The tinapa is from the native cuisine (smoking being one of the ways of
preserving food in the days before refrigeration), and chicharron is from the Spanish, but they are combined in a
dish of Chinese origin. A special example of adaptation through ingredients is pancit buko, in which flour noodles
are replaced by strips of young coconut cut and treated like noodles.

Bringhe would also be an example of a cultural change made through the use of ingredients from the Philippine
landscape. Paella is generally made in Spain with chicken or rabbit, with rice and seasoning, especially saffron.
Bringhe does use chicken, but the rice is malagkit and the sauce is coco-nut milk, to which is added a bark called
ange, which turns the rice green instead of saffron yellow. Paella was created from the Spanish country
landscape—the rabbit scampering by, the chicken bought from a farmer, the saffron which is the most
expensive spice in the world and grows in Spain. Eating paella, therefore, is ingesting the Spanish landscape.
Eating bringhe, however, is ingesting the Philippine landscape—the chicken running around on the farm, the
coconut from a near-by tree, and the malagkit for fiesta cakes. This is a clear example of indigenization through
a change of substance, spirit and name.

The cooking process.

This is probably the anvil in which many a cultural change is field and given a
Philippine shape. We have already mentioned adobo, in which stewing with spices
became stewing in vinegar, garlic, pepper and bay leaf, in the process making sure
that the dish would keep long without need of refrigeration and endowing it with
that slight sourness that is a favored Philippine flavor.

Pag-gigisa, or sautéeing, is a technique foreign to the indigenous cuisine, which is

mostly boiled, roasted, or steamed (halabos). It may have been learned from the
Chinese stir-frying, in which food cut up in small pieces is moved quickly around in
a little oil/lard. But certainly, most of it was learned from the Spanish (the terms
gisa/gisado, derived from the Spanish guisado, or cooked dish, indicate that), who
sauté in olive oil with perhaps an onion and a garlic clove.

The Filipino sautéeing, however, has become set into a pattern: heat the oil; sauté the garlic till golden brown;
add the onions and sauté till soft and transparent; add the sliced tomatoes and sauté till cooked; and then add
sahog (the principal flavoring ingredients, usually shrimps and/or pork)—and then add whatever else is being
cooked, like beans for ginisang sitaw. Through the years it has become a standard formula, and many cooks say
that the secret of good cooking is in the pace and contents of the gisado. One must know exactly when the next
item should be added, and it is also said of good cooks that their pag-gigisa can make any lowly vegetable or
leftover taste good.

What we have here is a particular indigenizing process discovered and set through the years. The Filipino gisado
has to have that garlic, onion, tomato and sahog base, and this preliminary process can Filipinize anything—
cauliflower, leftover fish, scrambled eggs, noodles, paella (restaurateur and chef Leny Guerrero says that is the
secret of her paella), and even canned mackerel from Japan (colloquially called sardinas). The sahog may be
optional, but not the garlic, onion, and tomato; while in Spanish cuisine a guisado may have one or two of the
above, but not usually all three. The Filipino gisado is indeed an indigenizing process all by itself.

Flavoring

If the gisado tunes the food to Filipino tastes, even more so do the dipping sauces called sawsawan and the
standard table sauces like bagoong and patis. Bagoong and patis are used not only to salt food, but also to give
the food an acceptable Filipi-no taste. Tales have been told of Filipino travellers and honeymooners venturing
into alien cuisines, armed with bottles of patis. No matter how strange or different the food, the patis gives it
Filipino flavor, so that the diner’s culture-bound taste buds can relate to it.

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What really adjusts the food to the individual and his learned food values, and adapts it to the particular
regional individual culture of the diner, is the sawsawan. Chinese food does not have this galaxy of flavor-
adjusters: vinegar and garlic; kalamansi; soy sauce, patis, and garlic; bagoong, tomatoes, and onions; green
mango or kamyas with tomatoes and onions; chicharron, bagoong, and coriander leaf; bagoong Balayan and
kalamansi; sinamak—vinegar in which chilis, garlic, and pepper are marinated; native pearl onions (sibuyas
Tagalog) and vinegar (sukang Iloco); miso (soy bean cake) sau-téed in garlic, onions, and tomatoes; sliced fresh
tomatoes (for fish); sliced paho (tiny, tart man-goes); crushed tamarind, etc. etc.—and now, of course, ketchup
and Worcestershire sauce as well.

What does this mean, and why is the Filipino diner allowed to tamper with his food in such profligate,
extravagant ways? When he does, the chef in the kitchen will not threaten murder or suicide, because it is
understood that the diner can take part in the preparation of the dish by using his sawsawan. I read this as
evidence of the sense of community of the Filipino, the bond between all cooks and their clients, all the
backstage crew and the guys onstage, the farmer and the neighbors and relatives who form his support
network. It is like plowing a field or moving a house bayanihan style; it is like a whole town staging a komedya,
when even the director is not the absolute dictator, her-manos and elders having a large say in product and
process.

The sawsawan is itself another indigenizing process. The Filipino conquers the foreign taste and culture with an
army of sawsawan, insists on participation and involvement, accepts nothing passively, but takes an active part
in the creation of his food. The sawsawan is not dish-specific, not assigned to particular recipes, although there
are some traditional partners. This is indeed an arsenal with which to meet and subdue the foreign invader, and
render him /it acceptable to the native culture. It indicates an ethos completely different from that prevailing in
France, where the chef is the master creator and has sole authority over the dish. For the diner to tamper with it
is discourtesy and insult. In the Philippine experience, the diner cooperates and participates, and the creation is
communal. The sawsawan thus transforms not only the taste, but also the relationship behind the experience.

Social position
Still another element that must be examined in the process of
indigenization is the social position given the dish in the cross-cultural
transfer. In China, for example, siomai and siopao are foods of every-day,
eaten at breakfast, or at tea-time, not generally at festivals or for main
meals. Where do we find them in the Philippine menu? At merienda, in
homes, schools, the streets; not usually at principal or festive meals either.
These foods, as well as most of Chinese cuisine, entered Philippine culture
at “ground-level,” at the level of everyday food, and found their final place
there, among the kakanin of the native culture. Since the ingredients and the nature of these dishes were found
compatible with the budget of that level, and with the other accompaniments (such as tea, coffee and salabat),
the social rank in which indigenization ensconced it in Philippine cuisine was equivalent to that which it held in
China. The porridge (lugaw) with chicken, Žsh or pork of Chinese breakfasts and late-night suppers is now the
arroz caldo (note the change of name and language) and goto of Philip-pine meriendas and late-night snacks.
The everyday noodles of China are also ordinary in the Philippines—mami, lomi, pancit bihon— although with
special ingredients they can become fiesta food, just as there are special noodles in China.

The Spanish food absorbed into the culture, however, has acquired a high social position and is located in the
level of special, or festive food. Cocido, in Spain, is a simple dish in which one finds meat (beef or lamb) and a
piece each of blood sausage (morcilla), salt pork (tocino), and ham—items found hanging in almost every
Spanish kitchen—cooked with garbanzos and a bit of cabbage. It is daily food, ordinary, a pot thrown together, a
one-dish meal that is not special.

In the Philippines, however, since the ham and sausages are rare in the native kitchen and, being imported, are
expensive, the dish has ascended the social ladder to become special food, for Christmases and family reunions.
When set against the background of the indigenous fish-and-vegetable cuisine, this is indeed a rare and
expensive dish. Moreover, coming from the alien, dominant culture, it acquires a cachet of “class” and a position
in the cuisine of the elite. It would, quite simply, be beyond the ordinary man’s budget.

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Paella has had an even more noticeable change in social position. Originally a dish cooked in the field in Spain,
the paellera set on stones over a wood fire, the ingredients what-ever could be conveniently found in the field (a
rabbit, a chicken), in the Philippines it has become the prime fiesta food. Because it is Spanish and special, it is
usually enriched with pork, chicken, crabs, clams, prawns, and Spanish sausages (rare then, expensive now). The
wine added to it in Spain is generally table wine, which is drunk like water while cooking with wine in the
Philippines means adding something rarefied and expensive. Thus the social transformation of paella has much
to say about the original (colonizer) and receiving (colonized) cultures, as well as about colonization and the
process of culture change.

We thus note that the Chinese food now found in homes, merenderos, school cafeterias, cheap restaurants and
the streets came in from traders and not from conquerors. The food of the conquerors, because of both the
source and the sheer cost, can now be found on fiesta tables, on the dining tables of the elite, and in expensive
restaurants, where it is billed as Spanish and not Filipino food. The Nielson Tower restaurant in Makati offers
this “antebellum Philippine food” on a menu written in Spanish.

The native cuisine

Having examined the names, ingredients, cooking methods, means
for flavor adjustment, and social position of foreign food
borrowed, adapted, and indigenized by the Filipino, let us now
take a look at the indigenous cuisine. This was the standard for
indigenization—taking the process to mean that by which the
foreign food is made compatible with the native cuisine.

If the foreign-influenced food in the culture has Chinese, Spanish,

Mexican and, in Mindanao, Arab and Indian roots, it would follow that the indigenous cuisine would be all the
rest that is in the food lexicon. Here would belong the sour-stewed (sinigang, paksiw), steamed (pina-singaw,
halabos), roasted (inihaw), and boiled (nilaga)—the terminology, we note, exists in the vernacular—dishes we
still have in the present. The ingredients for these are culled from the landscape: fish and shellfish from the seas,
rivers, brooks, streams, flooded rice fields; the flesh of domesticated animals like pig and chicken and yes, dog
and carabao, and that of undomesticated (wild) animals like usa (deer), baboy dame (wild boar), musang
(wildcat), bayawak (iguana), paniqui (fruit bat); other edible creatures like kamaru (mole cricket), salagubang
(June beetle) and locusts; and of course the leaves, bulbs, tendrils, seeds, and fruits of the ever-green Philippine
landscape.

The cooking methods probably evolved from the freshness, proximity and availability of the ingredients. Native
wisdom shows that the best way to treat these is to cook them very little, or not at all (kinilaw). The cuisine did
not evolve sauces because there was no need to disguise flavors going bad or slightly off (one function of sauces
and spices in Europe). Sour cooking, smoking, and pickling evolved because there was a need to preserve
without refrigeration.

This native cuisine is also subject to the flavoring pro-vided by sauces like patis and bagoong, and the sawsawan,
because this is where the communal creation of food started, in the agricultural lifestyle of the tribal
communities of the pre-Hispanic Filipino. In this cuisine are expressed the flavors of the native tongue and taste.
It is to this standard that the foreign foods are compared, and to which they are adjusted in budget, taste, and
economic level. This is quite naturally the cuisine in the heartland of the Filipino, the one he longs for when he is
away, the one he finds comforting. It is part of his ethos.

This is a cuisine linked and allied to those of the rest of Southeast Asia. With the rest, it shares rice as a staple
food—rice treated not only as cereal, but as background for all other tastes, and thus a determinant of other
tastes—rice as ritual food, rice not just as an extender but as highly valued taste and aroma. With the rest, it
also shares the extensive and varied uses of coconut—water, fresh, milk, the heart of palm. There is an easily
perceptible similarity between sinigang and all the sour broths of the region, like the Thai tomyam. And there is
a common use of fermented sauces, like bagoong (trassi in Indonesia, blachan in Malaysia, kapi in Thailand,
main tom in Vietnam) and patis (nam pla in Thailand, nuoc main in Vietnam, petis in Indonesia).

This native cuisine is, amazingly, hardly changed in nature or spirit. Sinigang is still soured with sour fruits and
leaves from the Philippine landscape. It is still as flexible, friendly to any kind of fish, meat, or vegetable,
adjustable to any kind of budget or circumstance. What has become available to sinigang, however, is new

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technology. Sour broth from tamarind can now be had in an instant “add-water-only” package, which Filipinos
consider good for emergencies and for Filipinos in the U.S., but which housewives here scorn to use because the
fresh ingredients are available and of better value even if less convenient.

Paksiw and inihaw are still cooked in the same way, even though the need for coal fires and preservation in
vinegar is no longer present in houses with gas and electric stoves, and refrigerators. When the Filipino
entertains family or intimate friends, or when he wants to eat in relaxed familiarity—with his hands—he returns
to this native cuisine and tries to have it in as pristine a form as possible. Fish are caught in ponds or pens and
roasted on the spot; restaurants have opened on the Bicutan bay shore and feature lake fish; milkfish is stuffed
with onions and tomatoes and roasted over coals in the yard, with the cook fanning away.

The native cuisine proved itself strong and resistant to “fraternization” with the foreign invaders. The original
dishes have retained their ingredients, cooking methods, and spirit. Foreign dishes have been Filipinized, but
Philippine dishes have not been Sinicized or Hispanized. The cultural interaction has been one of borrowing
whole dishes, then adapting and indigenizing them, rather than borrowing elements to impose on native dishes.
The result is a cuisine enriched rather than bastardized, its integrity kept, its dynamism that of judicious
response to change.

Could this perhaps serve as an analog with which to understand indigenization in language, in theatre, and in
other areas of Philippine culture? Surely the pattern cannot be identical in all areas. Perhaps in some, the
borrowed elements may have over-whelmed the native forces. But it is important to realize that in food, the
most popular form of popular culture, created by the mass in their daily activity, in an act of unconscious
transformation and creation, this is what happened.

The native culture stood firm and “kept the faith,” borrowing only technology (freezers, pressure cookers,
instant flavorings) when necessary, but not changing in essence.

Foreign culture was tried, examined, adjusted, and then used as the base for creation within the Philip-pine
lifestyle. The fact that borrowed Spanish culture came to have a high place in social estimation and regard is
eloquent about colonization and the attitudes it engenders in the colonized. It also suggests that the colonial
attitude (mentality) may not have come about only because of conquest but because of such a pragmatic
dimension as cost, budget, economics. (Chinese food is definitely within reach; the ingredients of Spanish food
are not.) Only the native elite, not the masses, could afford the colonizer’s lifestyle, and so the former became
colonized not only by the desire to emulate prestige and class but through their wealth.

These preliminary notes on the indigenization of food suggest further research: on the linguistic fac-tor, the
names not only of food, but of cooking implements and
processes; and on the nature of all the culinary sources,
and the change in them through indigenization. What, for
example, do the carajay, sianse and sinaing indicate about
native and adapted food? The transformation of the
Cantonese breakfast, rice porridge, into the goto and arroz
caldo of the Philippine merienda—what does it say?

Research should also be extended to such related subjects

as the service of food, food etiquette and ways, the non-
nutritional functions of food (ritual, medicinal, social), and
the further functions of food as a language (what are all
the many messages it bears?).

We have suggested how eating is the ingestion of culture. Deeper exploration is called for. When the Filipino
adapted paella and pancit, pag-gigisa, and pressure-cooking, what effect did that have on him, on his culinary
culture, and on the future of the native culture?
Source: Fernandez_Culture ingested. (n.d.). Scribd. https://www.scribd.com/document/480203541/Fernandez-Culture-ingested

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