The rice of life

April 6, 2007 1:28:25 PM

Good Friday!

The Philippines is in many ways a much more Christian nation than the USA is. Signs of religion are everywhere - from the Marian shrine in the departure lounge at the airport to the recorded call to prayer at noon over department store Muzak speakers. All TV shows this afternoon are religiously themed. Stores and offices are closed. Today, on Good Friday, everyone's either home or on vacation somewhere like Boracay or Los Baños.

Culinarily, Good Friday means we don't eat meat. That means we eat everything else.

Lunch today:
- Fried egg with tuna, salt, and garlic - a very good balance between the egg and tuna so it's neither too eggy nor too fishy
- Salad of daikon radish, finely chopped onion, and tomatoes - quite sharp tasting, mostly from the onion, and too thinly sliced to be crunchy
- A tinola of mongo (mung beans), green papaya, kamote tops (sweet potato leaves), and sardines - very good, hearty and healthy
- Fried lumpia (spring roll) with ubod (heart of palm) filling - slightly sweet with a shell that's almost pastry-like, not crunchy
- Philippine mango (mangga) that's just short of being fully ripe - with both the expected sweetness of a good mango and plenty of bite from the acid of unripe fruit
- Watermelon
- RICE.



Rice is at every meal here - if there's no rice, it's likely a merienda, a snack, not a meal at all. A 16-ounce steak with salad on the side wouldn't be a complete meal without some rice.

The Philippine languages have a word for raw, unprocessed rice (palay); a word for processed, uncooked rice (bigas); a word for steamed rice (kanin); a word for fried rice (kalo-kalo or sinangag); and a word for the stuff you eat with your rice (viand or ulam).

Fast food stores here, even those with American roots like McDonalds and KFC, sell rice with their meals. Rice is on the table of every family, from the poorest (who might have only mashed banana or a little dried fish as their ulam) to the wealthiest who can eat whatever they like; somebody in one of the Makati skyscraper complexes is having Russian caviar and Philippine rice as we speak. Rice is what everyone shares in common, a great equalizer. There is no food in American cuisine with corresponding importance; we eat far more bread and potatoes, corn and pasta - more of everything else, in fact. Here, rice is life.