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Reborn through Food

My Scholarship entry - Understanding a Culture through Food

WORLDWIDE | Monday, 23 April 2012 | Views [170] | Scholarship Entry

Despite being Filipino-Indian, I had spent the first 3 decades of my life in the Philippines, and at 32, I met my Indian father for the first time and was trying to get to know him and his culture. But after 2 weeks in a foreign land, the heart tires of empathizing with strange people, the tongue refuses to stretch across the language barrier, and the palate craves familiar, comforting flavors. In my case, I missed the taste of the plain, starchy, mildly aromatic rice we have back in the Philippines, and I had 8 more weeks to go.

Let me exaggerate: I felt like I was dying. The subcontinent was eating me up. But that may not be a bad thing. If Indian cuisine were like the Hindu religion, then you’d have a pantheon of spices and flavors: the purifying chili demons, the divine aromas of cardamom and cloves, the earthy stability of cumin and turmeric, the sweetness that gets coaxed out of onions and tomatoes. And you only die to reincarnate, reborn in a world of subtle flavors hiding behind the fiery, pungent edifice that intimidates a lot of foreigners. One learns to savor all tastes equally, like a yogi in meditation knowing that all of them are aspects of the same transcendent experience.

The trip also let me rediscover the Filipino cuisine that I grew up with, which is perhaps more monotheistic. If the meat dish--say, adobo--is God, then the rice is the heavenly host. The intense and bold flavors Filipinos prefer in their meats are tempered by the mild aromas of rice, preferably steamed to fluffy perfection. It’s difficult for me to describe what has always been there, but it took the complexity of Indian cooking to make me appreciate the elegance of Filipino cuisine.

Since that first time, in 2008, I have been back to India 2 more times. I can cook some Indian dishes with my eyes closed while improving my grasp of Filipino dishes. It took an eight-week trip to kill off my old impressions of this world to be reborn into this adventure, one that has just begun.

Tags: Travel Writing Scholarship 2012

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