chew on this
“What one puts into the mouth is the end result of a process that starts with the sea, the soil, animal life. In the act of cooking, we make statements about ourselves — and about our understanding of relationships between ingredients; about our perception of taste and appropriateness. In the act of eating, we ingest environment, but we do not stop at that, for we Filipinos make eating the occasion for ritual — and ritual the occasion for eating. We build ceremony around it; we create celebration. To quote Eddy in our book Sarap: “We do not simply ingest our environment. We dance to it, dance with it, sing to it, caress it; we are in awe of it, and respectful towards it. Eating is not just ingestion. Eating is the occasion for the rites and rituals of our lives. Eating is praxis in social amenities. Eating is language that speaks to the nuances of what we are.
Eating is making alive the various and variegated conjugations of our lives.”
- Doreen G. Fernandez, Tikim.
