I sometimes think that if a French chef – and a well-respected one at that – starts to make gentle reminders about how Filipinos should preserve their own culinary identity, it behooves us to rethink our whole cultural identity in terms of food.
Take halo-halo, for example: back in grade school Civics class, our teachers reminded us that halo-halo is the quintessential Filipino dish, because it incorporates all the influences of our foreign colonizers into a distinctive, delicious, delectable Filipino dessert. “Ice from China, ice cream from America, confections from Spain.” While dried, rotted meat (etag) and the joys of saluyot are hardly things we serve in Filipino restaurants, it’s pretty difficult to establish the roots of Filipino cooking, where a dish could be properly established as “Filipino” without debating on the colonial origins of a particular dish.
