The Filipino-style spaghetti, for me, is not a dish brought about by the idea of “sweetness” in Filipino cuisine.  Rather, it is dish made from the cupboard.  There are many variations to the Filipino-style spaghetti that speak to its origins in the eccentricities and quirks of the Filipino kitchen: hot dogs, for one.  Canned tuna, for others, and still for others cans of corned beef thrown into the mix.  The thing with Filipino-style spaghetti is that it is not deliberately shopped for: in many ways it is an analogue to Creole jambalaya.  We put whatever we have in the pan.

While it would be a gross understatement – disrespect, even – to say that “there is no Filipino cuisine,” the dishes that we have appropriated for ourselves as a legacy of colonization and fragmentation are themselves best characterized by assembly and substitution more than the rigors of taste.  While the French would demand only the best of rascasse for bouillabaise, sinigang na isda isn’t very particular with the kind of fish thrown in.  There is no recipe: there are just takes on a recipe.

This is not to say that our cuisine is careless: rather, it is adaptive.  It is not to say that we are not protective of our own cuisine: rather, it is to say that that passing Filipino food can be created anywhere where there is a stove, a pan, and some familiar ingredients.

Such is the quirkiness of Filipino-style spaghetti, which counts Vienna sausages and SPAM as perfectly acceptable additions to a red sauce that is also as adaptive and flexible.  It is somewhat an extension of our penchant for “making do,” which finds its extremes in bahala na but finds its place in our kitchen.

Even in the poorest of households where celebrations are often so Spartan, spaghetti can be made.  The noodles may be a bit soggy and the sauce watery with its hotdogs sliced so thinly, but it is still – indisputably – spaghetti.  “Sweet,” because of all the sugar thrown in to make the dish more festive, palatable, and to save on other savory ingredients.  It is a dish that finds its roots in improvisation more than the tradition of taste.

The way I see it, our cuisine is one marked by the quest for identity.  There is only one “Filipino-style” dish that finds itself in the vernacular, and that’s spaghetti: the rest being more or less regional (like Cebu lechon, or Bicol Express, for that matter).  That’s nothing to be disappointed about or frowned upon, but the fact that the national take on spaghetti is a product of so much of the indigenous and the colonial all in one dish should help us come into grips with the realities of who we are, more than say, halo-halo.  It’s more than Del Monte’s Tetra-Paks of Filipino-style spaghetti sauce, but in the methods and ingredients and the occasions where this particular dish is served wherever a Filipino may be.

Doreen Fernandez once wrote, “Traditional ways are wonderful; but new ways, when applied with understanding and sensitivity, can create a dish anew – without betraying the tradition.”  Filipino-style spaghetti, and all our other culinary stylings like laing pizza and our takes on insert-meat-here a’la pobre, is tradition.  More than the haughty idea of tradition, though, is that Filipino cuisine can be made with anything and anywhere: and that taste is a matter of a cuisine alive in the act and practice of cooking more than the formulations and calculations in a cookbook.

* – Inspired by “Mythologies” by Roland Barthes

Grimod de la Reynière – the original foodie – wrote a bunch of essays that, in today’s food blogging world, would make him a foodie.  After all, Grimod was an expert in:

• Reviewing restaurants and writing the occasional revenge-motivated essay;
• Food trivia on ingredients and foodstuffs that you can’t have, and;
• Waxing philosophically on random food items as metaphors for life.

For all intents and purposes, Grimod “blogged” way before we started going into openings of restaurants in malls clutching netbooks and iPads because we review food.  Or become part of a “food blogger” niche.

Of course, Grimod did not walk into restaurants for the sole purpose of taking pictures of food, as is the norm today.  It was the 1800′s: Grimod did not paint still life of bouillabaisse or made woodcuts of suckling pigs.  Grimod ate, analyzed, left, and ate again.  For all intents and purposes, Grimod was the Big Bad… Gourmand.

Don’t get me wrong: I like reading food blogs, I like foodies, and I think that it’s a sad state of blogging in the Philippines to think that such a happy topic is more prone to flak than, say, political blogging.  The bashing of a “member of the Yellow Horde” is nothing compared to the online flogging of a “gatecrasher” or a “free food blogger;” mostly because it affects social taste, and hits us pretty bad in the stomach.  Had Grimod lived today and blogged in the Philippines, he would have been so hated, reviled, and pretty much blacklisted by that omniscient bearer of invites and press kits, “PR.”

No, this is not a knock on “biases” or “reviews” or whatnot.  I just feel that in this age of the free and the sponsored meal that happens almost every day, there’s no review for the guy who sells lunches to the offices.  No McDonald’s meal has been reviewed.  There is no single compelling piece out there that will defend the giniling of a C. Palanca Jollyjeep from the fans of Monday lechon kawali over at a Valero Jollyjeep.  This is not just about the quality of the food we’re writing about, but the quality of writing.  The synonyms of “delicious” and “succulent” do not make the difference.  It’s easier to find things in a thesaurus than to find real, delicious food.  More than the marketing, it’s in the eating, and the expression of the eating.

I don’t question the love for food, but I do underscore the big difference between the gastronomic essay and the food review.  The former is an exposition, the latter is a laundry list.  The former is an exploration, the latter is a sell.  The foodie from the gourmand: the former loves food, the latter lives food.  I guess that’s what I’m looking for as a reader: not a Doreen Fernandez with an encyclopedic knowledge for food, but a Grimod who has a deep appreciation for food and expresses it well.  I tried, but somehow I really can’t do it.  I really don’t know how, but all I’m saying is that maybe the marketing can take the backseat when we’re writing about what matters: taste, texture, flavor, and the things about food that take more than a recommended adjective to describe.  One, as a friend says, that takes passion.

Before we start sticking telephoto lenses on steaks, or raving about how flaky the cream dory is on 20 or so fish restaurants, or scramble over invites to dinner to some foo-foo restaurant we could go to once or twice a year on, a word from Grimod:

Life is so brief that we should not glance either to far backwards or forwards… therefore study how to fix our happiness in our glass and in our plate.

Anyway here’s a picture of fried chicken and fries.

Crisp, almost cookie-like breading on the chicken.  The fries had an earthy note, I guess from the sweetness of the sugars in the starchy wedges and the crisp skin left on the potato.  The meat on the chicken remained juicy but the peppery crust on the skin was perfectly seasoned, with a lemony aftertaste.  Superb, delicious, great value at P170.

Of course, I’m not really a food blogger so that’s all I got.

Above is the Malaysian national dish, nasi lemak. Me, my girlfriend Jam, and her cousin Chill had dinner at a restaurant called Nasi Lemak in Robinson’s Galleria (no, the meal was not free, and yes, it’s ethical to say that), apparently ran by Chef Gene Gonzalez.  While Jam and Chill had… succulent… plates of Hainanese Chicken Rice to go with the delectable tom yum goong and the exceptional Malaysian chicken curry, I chose the nasi lemak. “A complete meal,” I justified to myself, anticipating the fun I would have mixing coconut cream rice with chicken, fish, egg, peanuts, and dried anchovies.  That, or I was preparing myself for philosophizing in the comfort of my own toilet bowl.

Suffice to say the dinner affair between me and a plate full of food became a battle of brawn, appetite, and shredded bits of chicken.

Now before this all gets lost and misinterpreted in a river of “revenge blogs” and posts on terrible food experiences, Nasi Lemak is a fine, fine restaurant.  It’s perhaps the closest you’ll get to Singaporean food if you’re in a mall.  Yet when faced with the ravenous appetite of a guy whose idea of a balanced diet is crispy pata and kare-kare, disasters of aesthetics and the appetite can and do happen.

It looked exactly like that.  Chill would make remarks about how gross the plate looked like, and Jam would pat my back and convince me that I could let the plate go if I wanted to.  Being a stubborn guy, I decided to shred the chicken a little more, leave the fish alone, and just have a go at it; never mind if I add a couple of inches to my waistline.  Or completely ignore table manners and etiquette and just take the food on like a pig to the feeding trough.  Two Cokes and 30 minutes later, trying to wolf down a perfectly good dish that would look at home in a dog’s feeding bowl, I gave up.  I tapped out – literally – and admitted that my culinary handiwork would be right in place with cadaver dissections or exhibits on the macabre and downright disgusting.

The waiter handed the bill over and I asked, “Boss, is this the serving for one?”

“Yes sir,” he quietly and thoughtfully replied.  Maybe this is not the first time he saw this happen.

I guess in the battle of Man vs. Big Hunking Serving of Food That’s a Steal at A Couple of Hundred Pesos, the latter wins.  Beats the diner handily by submission.  The psychological effect of “Eat Me” forever etched in the back of his mind, just like a Chic-Boy dinner at the last stage of overtime-induced hunger.

Never again.

Leaving the restaurant with a half-eaten (it’s not a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty thing) I am reminded of the many visions Dante conjured up to punish the gluttons of the heathen earth: hellhounds, the worms that feed off its waste, a cesspool of fetid viscera and human waste, and the first literal allusion to the shitstorm.  Mom always told me I’m going to Hell for leaving a plate of perfectly good food go to waste…

I’d definitely go back, but maybe this time I’m having the healthful plate of Hainanese.

I’m being gentle.

It’s a matter of execution, DOT Undersecretary Enteng Romano says, but that’s just it: it’s part of the execution.  “Pilipinas, Kay Ganda” may be the big idea of a whole set of specific executions for the DOT’s campaign, but even the creation of a tagline – the definition of the ought-to-be-situation of Filipino tourism – should be meaningful.  Should it translate to “Pilipinas: Life is Beautiful?”  Or “Beautiful Pilipinas?”

David Ogilvy puts it quite succinctly for copy headlines, but I think the same is true for slogans:

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

Which brings me back to why the campaign handle, well, sucks: in my view, “Pilipinas, Kay Ganda” is a good slogan, and a campaign in good spirits, but is out of context.

Before anything else: I’ve learned a lot from very experienced and esteemed people, friends, and colleagues over the past few years on the matter of copywriting, branding, and advertising.  It would be a shame if I didn’t share some of the things I’ve learned from them.  I’m not saying I know how to fix the problem or that I have the monopoly of judgment; it’s just considering the problem, framing it to everything I’ve learned, put some insight to it, and share it.

I tend to believe that in advertising (which all this is), there’s a difference between big ideas and big ideologies. Big ideas come from the context where everything takes place; this is why good advertisers and marketers take the time to read, observe, and do studies and research out in the field.  Big ideologies, on the other hand, are imposed on the context where everything takes place; it is the layer of illusion that keeps a lot of people from understanding the what-is.

Of course the DOT has a limited budget.  Of course the use of English sounds “mainstream,” and not really all that different from our Asian neighbors.  Yet of course, that’s the point of a competitive tourism campaign, or any campaign for that matter: to make do with what one has, and kick ass doing it.

Is “Pilipinas, Kay Ganda” useful for the DOT?  Yes, but it is not useful for the non-Filipino speaking tourists who come here.  The letdown is its arbitrariness: what emotions does it evoke?  When you speak of a beautiful flower, or a beautiful hill, or the beautiful sight of the Banaue Rice Terraces, what would the reader (in this case, the tourist) do next?  In this case, the beauty is imposed, it is contrived, and it is terminated early on without action; that 7,107 islands in the Philippines are beautiful.

My suggestion? “Welcome Home to the Philippines.” To me, it sounds complete.  It’s something that arises naturally from who we are as a people, emphasizing traits like community and hospitality.  It’s contextualized.  It calls people to action.  It closes around itself: there’s no place like home, and there’s no place like the Philippines, and you’re as welcome here as you are in your respective countries.  And it’s easy to play around with it for commercials, print copy, digital, and so on.

Of course, perhaps there are better ways of crafting the copy, or there are better ideas out there.  Like:

• Party Pilipinas.  (Ain’t no party like a Pinoy party…)
• Pilipinas, Gondoh Numun.  (You gotta admit…)
• Pilipinas.  Shala Ditez.  (Charot lang.)
• Philippines.  I Want It That Way.  (Which should lead to…)
• Philippines.  Anywhere For You.  (Which inevitably leads to…)
• Philippines: Larger Than Life.

And my three favorites:

• Pilipinas: Bongga.  (Alternatively, “Pilipinas: Have a Bongga Ka Day.”)
• Pilipinas, because love mo ‘ko.  (Yes, it’s that song.)
• FuckYeahPhilippines.  (I’m so backing this up.)

It’s like the medieval Great Hall, Filipino Style: with all the sweetness and the sourness of the Filipino attitude, and those hotdogs decorated with marshmallows, skewered on halved cabbage heads.

The Filipino buffet, to me, has almost always taken a rather familiar route.  I’m not talking about hotel buffets or all-you-can-eat specials at restaurants, but the typical Pinoy one: the common putahe served to celebrate everything from a wedding to a funeral.  It almost always includes rice, some form of pancit, some form of lumpia, and a whole array of foods that can be made from pork or chicken in various states of food warmer-aided coagulation; seasoned and enhanced with various degrees of MSG, save for macaroni salad and buko pandan somewhere in the end of the line.

Huwag na kayong mahiya, the host says, kain pa kayo! Not that one turns a snobbish eye to costly party food (no matter how economical the buffet is), but the polite recalcitrance comes from that quaint Pinoy trait of deference.  Once somebody musters up the courage to start eating, the rest of the guests file up for the meal.

It is in the buffet where the pila is respected the most: say what you will about Filipinos cutting the line or being impatient, but the respectful attitude surfaces when one is in the presence of food.  There’s a certain refined art to getting only what you can eat: a spoonful of rice, a piece of shanghai, a shred of chicken breast, a few slices of lechon kawali, and a smattering of pancit, and the guest moves away.

Then there are the middle-aged women in silk blouses studded with fake rhinestones, toting Oleg Cassini factory run-off purses, walking by with pa-sosy airs right by the humble (and humbled) neighbors. The scent of the food from the buffet table becomes overpowered by the smell of Chinchansu and a suffocating excess of perfume.  They start piling sandwiches, chicken drumsticks, bihon, and all sorts of other treats as they hurry back to their tables.  They eat daintily, preserving some measure of class, but not without the pa-simple style of stuffing the entire plate into plastic bags, or foil tucked inside their bags.

Eating at the Filipino buffet requires a bit of manual dexterity.  Cutlery is in short supply since neighbors invite neighbors who invite close friends and relatives – who happen to be your uncles and aunts from your cousins’ godparents – so one has to make do with plastic spoons and forks.  The household and the guests of honor use plates and proper cutlery; the rest eat from paper plates with plastic kubyertos. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, save for the chismosa clique at one end of the room raving about how bad the food is or the affairs taking place at the next table.  I have never seen anyone used to knives and forks eat heartily from a buffet; it’s all a matter of the most elementary of eating skills with the most rudimentary of tools.  In this case, the rice can sop up the sauce from the afritada so that you can eat it more conveniently later.

The food itself is fair fare.  It’s not Sofitel Spiral or Manila Peninsula, but passable, edible, and for certain foodstuffs not to be touched by the hands of a chef (like pinapaitan and dinuguan), delicious.  Yet there are always some quirks to the meals in the buffet: the half-cooked carrots of the caldereta, the floury consistency of the fish fillet, the garbanzos in the menudo feeling a bit raw in the mouth.  The remainder of peas, almost always canned in gold-colored tins, left in many paper plates,is not the testament to the skill of the cook: but that the kakanin and the pancit bihon almost always never have any leftovers.

Towards the end of the buffet the dishes are piled in the sink for washing, the paper plates dumped into the garbage bags, and the Great Hall, Filipino style is ready for revelry.  Out comes the karaoke machine…

But that’s another story.

* – Photo sourced from Josh Root

She never liked them, she never had,
She doesn’t eat red eggs and scad.

Will she try them, just one piece?  A vegetarian is what she is.
Will she buy them just because, so she’ll understand our market laws?

No, Sam-I-Am, not today; she won’t buy ‘em anyway.

Would she have them here, or there?
You won’t find it in her bill of fare.

She doesn’t eat them, it’s just so sad
She knows not the price of red eggs and scad.

Sophomoric attempts at Dr. Seuss rhymes aside, Senator Jamby Madrigal isn’t exactly the newsmaker of the Senate.  Yet when she decided to run for the Presidency – assuming she’s doing this to continue her vendetta upon Manny Villar – she’s been languishing at the bottom of the surveys, if not mentioned at all.  Yet after what can now be called as “Galunggong-Gate” – where Sen. Madrigal fumbled on her answer regarding the price of galunggong – she may very well experience a surge in popularity.

Or that red eggs and tomatoes, eaten with galunggong, may just be the meal on the road to 2010.

Perhaps an appetite for elections triggers an appetite for something as base and common as, say, corned beef.  Take Billy Esposo, for example, who castigates Manny Villar in his column on the account of the latter’s memories of canned goods.  Esposo claims that Villar may have been unfairly exaggerating his (all-too-familiar) rags-to-riches story.  Esposo writes:

Villar narrated… that as a young kid he thought that corned beef was soupy because that was how they used to prepare it at home.  This, he claimed, was their way to ensure that everybody had a share…  The fact is that there are really two ways to cook canned corned beef.  One is the dry sautéed type while the other is the soupy type where you can add potatoes and cabbage.  Both the rich and the middle class enjoy corned beef both ways.

Also, poor folks, especially a family of eleven, CANNOT AFFORD to eat canned corned beef.  For a family of 11 to be eating corned beef confirms that the Villar family is anything but poor.  That was the case then and more so now when the poor go hungry or manage to eat only one meal a day.  Up to the 1980s, people from the provinces consider it a status symbol to be eating corned beef.  That is why canned foodstuffs, especially corned beef, are being displayed in the sala by many households in the provinces for these to be seen by visitors.

Case in point: imported canned food.  Yet even corned beef, as we understand it from the platito of our social consciousness, is not immune from the all-too-convenient categorizations of class.  Back in the 1990s, the cheaper brands of corned beef, like Rodeo, had more tendons, ligaments, and fat compared to something more expensive, like Hormel or (when it was first introduced) Argentina.  In Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, for example, the holiday “corned beef” given to the McCourts by the Vincent de Paul Society wasn’t meat at all, but a quivering mass of gray fat with but a tiny sliver of meat.  Esposo is correct, but with the relative ubiquity of corned beef in the Pinoy sari-sari store, even the lower middle class and the better-off poor would get more than “just a taste” of corned beef, as Villar claims.  That, cold rice, and lots of yummy, toasted garlic cooked in the rendered fat of the meat product.

The poorest among us master the art of pagreremedyo, and ask “Kumain ka na ba?” more often than those better-off than they are.  There’s value in instant noodles not as a source of starch, but as a viand, and lutong ulam is salted more than usual to accommodate for more rice, which then partly solves the problem of feeding so many mouths in a given meal.  Galunggong is now considered by many poor and indigent Filipinos as a luxury; at P120 a kilo, it’s just a bit too expensive to even eat it on a regular basis (whether fried, cooked as paksiw, or my favorite, broiled).  Think lower, to the act of flavoring rice: mantika at toyo, for example, can stave off the hunger lost on a meal completely devoid of protein.

Nakaligo ka na ba sa dagat ng basura? Please, even the poorest people on the planet use water.

Anyway, back to Jamby Madrigal.  I’m sure she’s sincere, that she’s knowledgeable, and she possesses a genuine concern for the poor even if she’s born with a complete set of sterling silverware in her mouth.  Yet vegetarianism or semantics should not excuse her from understanding the way of life of the poor, even if pan de sal could be aptly called a roll, it highlights at least one disconnect the leaders of this country have with their people: that our leaders live in a half of their world, and they don’t know how the other half lives.  Cough, Le Cirque.

On that note, I’m hungry.