Filipino eating habits change over time
Long time ago when living was not as fast-paced today, Filipinos ate mostly camote, rice, vegetable, nuts, fruits and everything that grew on plants. Land was so fertile that a single corn plant can bear as much as 15 fruits to the amazement of the Spanish friars who chronicled that it even surpassed that of Mexico corn that had only been bearing four fruits at the most.
Filipinos did not eat carabeef as carabaos roamed wildly in the mountains four hundred years ago; beef was only introduced with the introduction of vaca (cow) pairs from Southern America; and chickens were only domesticated for eggs.
With the advent of colonization and influence of the colonizers’ culture, the Filipino eating habits have been transformed slowly from vegetable to being meat-based. Communication technology and bombarded advertisements have been made the best tools for forcing Filipinos to drink imported milk and eat corned beef and sardines from the GI’s food supply. Now accustomed to drinking milk despite being lactose-intolerant, as mostly Asians do- and used to eating meat everyday as modeled by the status quo –eating habits have dramatically changed.
With fast-paced modern life in the 20th century came easy-to-cook meat-based products, a far cry from the fresh root crops, vegetables and fruits that Filipinos ate long time ago. Mention the words hamburgers, fried chicken and meat-loaded pizza and the kids will yell Jollibee, Mcdonald’s, or Shakey’s.
This changed eating habit has shortened the Filipino life span from living a healthy, heart-attack free old age of 90 to agonizingly painful and arthritic 60 years old if one does not die of heart attack at 50 or earlier. With many years of eating meat come accumulated toxins in the body that cause various diseases too many to mention.
Dr. Maan Canlas, a geriatrics doctor, says elderly people have poor metabolism and circulation because of poor eating habits and accumulated meat toxins in the body. She explains in the SAGE press launch that returning or turning to a vegetarian lifestyle will bring about healthy and happy disposition as body enzymes digest vegetable-based food easily and fibers in vegetables help in the bowel movement.
Olympics Taekwondo referee Ricardo Santiago, a vegetarian for 13 years testifies he has an active lifestyle, his body functions well and has not lost anything in becoming a vegetarian. Besides,“I look young,” he jokes.
His youngest sister Tuesday Santiago, also a vegetarian, confides becoming a vegetarian is “tough” with the young generation exposed to KFC, Macdonald’s and Jollibee nowadays. “But young people are waking up to the realities of the ‘vegetarian wave,’” she attests.
Nonie Fernando, SAGE representative who is a vegetarian for 38 years, says product availability is not a problem anymore because vegetarian items are now being sold in SM Makati and Megamall supermarkets. Besides, fresh vegetables are everywhere in the Philippines.
Returning to the Filipino original eating habits has now become a battle. While it has become a battle in business, it is a big battle of the self. Vegetarians in the Philippines, however, are a living testimony of winning in this battlefield collectively called life. (Gloria Esguerra Melencio)
Straight from the hearth
Mamang’s dinengdeng
By Gloria Esguerra Melencio
The aromatic, salty smell of dinengdeng always remind me of Mamang, the stoic Ilocana grandmother who practically raised me while my father was away earning a living and my mother was busy raising my younger siblings. It is from her whom I learn to cook dinengdeng the Ilocano way that father would always request me to cook it for him whenever I go home.
“Kuha mo ang lasa ng dinengdeng ni Mamang,” he tells me to my mother’s delight who is saved from one more cooking of the regular family meal.
Brewing her concoction of ginger, tomatoes, red onions with sticky calabasa, rounded gourd, winged beans, eggplants, caturay flowers and other vegetables freshly picked from her well-tended garden, this dinengdeng is the family dish that connects me to my Ilocano roots in Pangasinan and La Union.
Its salty flavor overpowers the bitter, tangy, sour and sweetish tastes that the hot, steamed rice balances. It must be so adventurous playing with balled rice cupped in a small fist but Mamang’s sharp eyes are enough to scare me to eat dinengdeng with fork and spoon instead.
She tells me she cannot live without dinengdeng. My father says he feels weak when he cannot eat dinengdeng for at least once a week. It has been a regular fare that even my Visayan mother became used to its taste but never got to cook it the way Mamang does.
The Ilocano dinengdeng is similar to the Waraynon nilapwahan, or the Cebuano bas-oy, or the Ilongo lasua – sans the bagoong isda. Many years later, I would be able to cook vegetarian dinengdeng that tastes like my grandmother’s but combined with my mother’s favorite herb, tanglad, minus garlic and onion.
My husband and children love it all just the same even requesting me to cook it at times – as I pass the torch of cooking the family recipe to a child who loves cooking, who incidentally is a girl.
Mamang’s dinengdeng is as stoic as this old lady who had gone through life’s ups and downs, topping in the list was the Second World War that wreaked havoc to her own family and uprooted her forever.
It was bitter than the rounded gourd in her dinengdeng that she would be able to disclose it by bits and pieces only while I was growing up; Hers was more sour than the tomatoes in it as she had shed tears silently in darkness over broken relationships; Saltier than the bagoong isda as she tried to tide things over of what was left of the war; More pungent of the winged beans or the eggplant as she prayed to high heavens for her family’s scarred spirit; Sweeter than the calabasa or the camote, nevertheless, as she tried to pass on to me her hopes and dreams – that I managed to reclaim back in Mamang’s dinengdeng.