Matter of Taste

Following is a from a British journalist stationed in the Philippines .
The observations are so hilarious!!!. This was written in 1999.

Good reading. Go back to your perceived heritage, culture, traditions,
beliefs, usages and see how the foreign guys think about it.

Matter of Taste
By Matthew Sutherland

I have now been in this country for over six years, and consider myself
in most respects well assimilated. However, there is one key step on the
road to full assimilation, which I have yet to take, and that's to eat
BALUT.

The day any of you sees me eating balut, please call immigration and
ask them to issue me a Filipino passport. Because at that point there
will be no turning back. BALUT, for those still blissfully ignorant
non-Pinoys out there, is a fertilized duck egg. It is commonly sold with
salt in a piece of newspaper, much like the English fish and chips, by
street vendors usually after dark, presumably so you can't see how gross
it is.

It's meant to be an aphrodisiac, although I can't imagine anything more
likely to dispel sexual desire than crunching on a partially formed baby
duck swimming in noxious fluid. The embryo in the egg comes in varying
degrees of development, but basically it is not considered macho to eat
one without fully discernible feathers, beak, and claws. Some say these
crunchy bits are the best. Others prefer just to drink the so-called
'soup", the vile, pungent liquid that surrounds the aforementioned
feathery fetus.excuse me; I have to go and throw up now. I'll be back in
a minute.

Food dominates the life of the Filipino, People here just love to eat.

They eat at least eight times a day. These eight official meals are
called in order: breakfast, snacks, lunch, merienda, merienda y cenda,
dinner, bedtime snacks and no-one-saw-me-take-that-cookie-from-the
fridge-so-it-doesn't-count.

The short gaps in between these mealtimes are spent eating Sky Flakes
from the open packet that sits on every desktop. You're never far from
food in the Philippines . If you doubt this, next time you're driving
home from work, try this game. See how long you can drive without seeing
food and I don't mean a distant restaurant, or a picture of food. I mean
a man on the sidewalk frying fish balls, or a man walking through traffic
selling nuts or candy. I bet it's less than one minute.

Here are some other things I've noticed about food in the Philippines :

Firstly, a meal is not a meal without rice - even breakfast. In the UK
, I could go a whole year without eating rice. Second, it's impossible
to drink without eating. A bottle of San Miguel just isn't the same
without gambas or beef tapa. Third, no one ventures more than two paces
from their house without baon (food in small container) and a container
of something cold to drink. You might as well ask a Filipino to leave
home without his pants on. And lastly, where I come from, you eat with a
knife and fork. Here, you eat with a spoon and fork. You try eating
rice swimming in fish sauce with a knife.

One really nice thing about Filipino food culture is that people always
ask you to SHARE their food. In my office, if you catch anyone attacking
their baon, they will always go, "Sir! KAIN TAYO!" (Let's eat!). This
confused me, until I realized that they didn't actually expect me to sit
down and start munching on their boneless bangus. In fact, the polite
response is something like, "No thanks, I just ate." But the principle
is sound - if you have food on your plate, you are expected to share it,
however hungry you are, with those who may be even hungrier. I think
that's great!

In fact, this is frequently even taken one step further. Many
Filipinos use "Have you eaten yet?" ("KUMAIN KA NA?") as a general
greeting, irrespective of time of day or location.

Some foreigners think Filipino food is fairly dull compared to other
Asian cuisines. Actually lots of it is very good: Spicy dishes like
Bicol Express (strange a dish named after a train); anything cooked with
coconut milk; anything KINILIAW; and anything ADOBO. And it's hard to
beat the sheer wanton, cholesterolic frenzy of a good old fashioned
LECHON de leche (roast pig) feast. Dig a pit, light a fire, add 50
pounds of animal fat on a stick, and cook until crisp. Mmm, mmm.You can
actually feel your arteries constricting with each successive mouthful.

I also share one key Pinoy trait --- a sweet tooth. I am thus the only
foreigner I know who does not complain about sweet bread, sweet burgers,
sweet spaghetti, sweet banana ketchup, and so on. I am a man who likes
to put jam on his pizza. Try it!

It's the weird food you want to avoid. In addition to duck fetus in
the half-shell, items to avoid in the Philippines include pig's blood
soup (DINUGUAN); bull's testicles soup, the strangely-named "SOUP NUMBER
FIVE" (I dread to think what numbers one through four are); and the
ubiquitous, stinky shrimp paste, BAGOONG, and it's equally stinky sister
PATIS. Filipinos are so addicted to these latter items that they will
even risk arrest or deportation trying to smuggle them into countries
like Australia and USA, which wisely ban the importation of items you can
smell from more 100 paces.

Then there's the small matter of the purple ice cream. I have never
been able to get my brain around eating purple food; the ubiquitous UBE
leaves me cold.

And lastly on the subject of weird food, beware: that KALDERETANG
KAMBING (goat) could well be KALDERETANG ASO (dog).

The Filipino, of course, has a well-developed sense of food. Here's a
typical Pinoy food joke: "I'm on a seafood diet. "What's a seafood
diet? "When I see food, I eat it!"

Filipinos also eat strange bits of animals --- the feet, the head, the
guts, etc., usually barbecued on a stick. These have been given witty
names, like "ADIDAS" (chicken's feet); "KURBATA" (either just chicken's
neck, or "neck and thigh" as in "neck-tie"); "WALKMAN" (pig's ears);
"PAL" (chicken wings); "HELMET" (chicken head); "IUD" (chicken
intestines), and "BETAMAX" (video-cassette-like! blocks of animal blood).
Yum, yum. Bon appetit.

"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches" - (Proverbs
22:1)

When I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six years ago, one of the
first cultural differences to strike me was names. The subject has
provided a continuing source of amazement and amusement ever since. The
first unusual thing, from an English perspective, is that everyone here
has nickname. In the staid and boring United Kingdom , we have nicknames
in kindergarten, but when we move into adulthood we tend, I am glad to
say, to lose them.

The second thing that struck me is that Philippine names for both girls
and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as overbearingly
cutesy for anyone over about five. Fifty-five-year-olds colleague put
it. Where I come from, a boy with a nickname like Boy Blue or Honey Boy
would be beaten to death at school by pre-adolescent bullies, and never
make it to adulthood. So, probably, would girls with names like Babes,
Lovely, Precious, Peachy or Apples. Yuk, ech ech. Here, however, no one
bats an eyelid.

Then I noticed how many people have what I have come to call "door-bell
names".

These are nicknames that sound like - well, doorbells. There are
millions of them. Bing, Bong, Ding, and Dong are some of the more
common. They can be, and frequently are, used in even more door-bell
like combinations such as Bing-Bong, Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting, and so on.
Even our newly appointed chief of police has a doorbell name Ping . None
of these doorbell names exist where I come from, and hence sound
unusually amusing to my untutored foreign ear.

Someone once told me that one of the Bings, when asked why he was
called Bing, replied, "because my brother is called Bong". Faultless
logic. Dong, of course, is a particularly funny one for me, as where I
come from "dong" is a slang word for well; perhaps "talong" is the best
Tagalog equivalent.

Repeating names was another novelty to me, having never before
encountered people with names like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or
Ning-Ning. The secretary I inherited on my arrival had an unusual one:
Leck-Leck. Such names are then frequently further refined by using the
"squared" symbol as in Len2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a
while.

Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a theme when naming
their children. This can be as simple as making them all begin with the
same letter, as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy.

More imaginative parents shoot for more sophisticated forms of
assonance or rhyme, as Biboy, Boboy, Baboy (notice the names get worse
the more kids there are-best to be born early or you could end up being a
Baboy)

Even better, parents can create whole families of, say, desserts (Apple
Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie) or flowers (Rose, Daffodil, Tulip). cars
like Mercedes and celeste, but Toyota and Nissan are baptized with gas or
diesel, The main advantage of such combinations is that they look great
painted across your trunk if you're a cab driver.

That's another thing I'd never seen before coming to Manila - taxis
with the driver's kids names on the trunk.

Another whole eye-opening field for the foreign visitor is the
phenomenon of the "composite" name. This includes names like Jejomar
(for Jesus, Joseph and Mary), and the remarkable Luzviminda ( for Luzon,
Visayas and Mindanao, believe it or not) That's a bit like me being
called something like "Engscowani" (for England , Scotland , Wales and
Northern Ireland ). Between you and me I'm glad I'm not.

And how could I forget to mention the fabulous concept of the randomly
inserted letter 'h'. Quite what this device is supposed to achieve, I
have not yet figured out, but I think it is designed to give a touch of
class to an otherwise only averagely weird name. It results in creations
like Jhun, Lhenn, Ghemma, and Jhimmy. O how about Jhun-Jun (Jhun2)?

How boring to come from a country like the UK full of people with names
like John Smith. How wonderful to come from a country where imagination
and exoticism rule the world of names.

Even the towns here have weird names; my favorite is the unbelievably
named town of Sexmoan (ironically close to Olongapo and Angeles). Where
else in the world could that really be true?

Where else in the world could the head of the Church really be called
Cardinal Sin?

Where else but the Philippines ! only in the Philippines

Note: Philippines has a senator called Joker, and it is his legal name.