Food in Daily Filipino Living
By: Khim Gerard S. Picpican
Food is a very big part of everyday living, especially for us Filipinos. According to dietitians and health experts, a person should regularly eat three full meals a day but in the Philippines, it’s eat-all-you-can. Every Filipino loves eating. Sometimes, we want two breakfast, two lunches or two dinners and lots of dessert. In between those meals, we eat lots of snacks and treats. We love chocolate, we love cake, we love steak, we love burgers, we love pizza, and we love almost everything that’s edible. We eat what we want and when we want to even if we aren’t yet hungry unless we’re on a diet.
Like many other Asian countries, rice is very essential during meals. Almost all Filipinos never eat breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner without rice, except on special occasions where we eat special kinds of food. On some occasions, we eat only meat, fish, vegetable, fruit, or root crops if we want to. Sometimes, when we celebrate, we have lechon (roasted) pig or chicken on our table, sometimes we have pancit which is a delicacy among us, and many other kinds of food. A very popular serving for men is pulutan (fried sautéed meat) which is eaten with or without beer and it does taste really good.
The Filipino tongue goes well with any kind of food. Our tongues easily adapt to new tastes and flavors of food. Some Filipinos don’t care about the ingredients as long as the food they are eating is palatable. Sometimes, we try to remember what it is called so that we could cook it or order it if we want to eat some of it again. Though the tongue goes well with any kind of food, the stomach doesn’t always agree with what we eat. But even if some foods don’t make our stomachs happy, most of us just can’t stop their craving for food.
I, myself, love eating too. It’s in my blood; I was born with the love for food. As long as it’s edible, it tastes good and it won’t kill me, I’ll eat it.