FILIPINO FOOD | filipinocuisineto

What is Filipino Food?

The late food author and critic Doreen G. Fernandez (1988) described Filipino food perfectly:

"The Filipino is often hard put to say just what Philippine food is [...] The reason for the confusion is that Philippine cuisine, as dynamic as any phase of culture that is alive and growing, has changed through history, absorbing influences, indigenizing, adjusting to new technology and tastes, and thus evolving" (p. 219).

In particular, these influences on the indigenous Malay food came from China and India through trade relations and Spain and America through colonization. Filipino food also reflects South Asian, Arab, Mexican, and indigenous practices (Fernandez, 1988). This explains why you can find food with Spanish names, such as arroz caldo, or Chinese names like siopao. These influences are what give the Filipino cuisine a particular taste that is often sweet, sour, and/or vinegar-based.

This video by Vice briefly displays the typical Filipino restaurant one would encounter in North America. Although set in California - the state with the largest population of Filipino immigrants in the U.S. - it is not very different from what one can find here in Toronto, the Canadian city with one of the largest populations of Filipinos in Canada.

Eddie Huang raises some important questions that are similar to the ones I have asked, and it is interesting to see how he explores them.

Huang takes us to Pampanga's Cuisine and later has a brief discussion about why Filipino food is not very well-received. At the 1:16 mark, someone humorously mentions that is may be because Filipino food is "not really appetizing by the sight--it looks like already chewed-up food--and people get the misconception that it probably tastes nasty". Huang suggests that trying other cultures' foods "is not intrinsic to North America either." He then begins to talk about what may make Filipino food more appealing to the average North American: "Our generation--it's our job to break the barriers and get people to eat out of their comfort zone", even if it means mixing one culture's food with another (in their case, tacos) or "modernizing" it.

But what does it mean to "modernize" a food? One of the restaurants I focused on, Lamesa, does just that. It takes authentic Filipino food, and modifies it with other food preparation techniques and ingredients to give it a twist, and perhaps, makes it more appealing to the non-Filipino customer. This also begs the question, what, then, makes food "authentic", like that served at Remely's? How does authenticity come into play in a commercialized restaurant like Max's? And does modernizing a food to suit the North American palate simply mean assimilating?