By Penelope A. Domogo, MD, retired Provincial Health Office 1, Mountain Province
March 21, 2019
Food and eating is nearest to people’s hearts and, whether we believe it or not, is a major determinant of our health. Thus these have been at the heart of our advocacy in the Provincial Health Office for healthy lifestyle for the past nearly two decades. I have worked in Bontoc as a Municipal Health Officer for 22 years and then as Provincial Health Officer 1 for 14 years. I have seen how our health as indigenous peoples here in Mountain Province and other IPs worldwide has deteriorated and continues to deteriorate. Do you know that Mountain Province has two dialysis centers? Not something to boast of. I am now retired from government service but our advocacy continues.
Rediscovering and revaluing our indigenous food traditions is, for me, the main strategy to reclaim our health and wellness as indigenous peoples especially here in the Cordillera. Since 2000, we have been going around the different parts of Mountain Province discovering their indigenous food and promoting them through our trainings, seminars and meetings. I’ve written about these, including some of the recipes mentioned in this book, in my column, Health as Choice, in Zigzag Weekly. As a Kankanaey Igorot who was born and raised in Besao and having lived in Bontoc for almost 38 years, I have tried many of recipes in this book. There’s an urgent need for us, as a people and as concerned organizations to rediscover and reclaim our indigenous knowledge systems, healing and wellness systems, values and practices as a whole as these are interrelated. This book Heirloom Recipes in the Cordillera, then, is a welcome development in our common journey towards living well on Mother Earth. This is a dream come true — hindi lang ako ang gumawa.
Congratulations to the Philippine Task Force for Indigenous Peoples Rights and the Partners for Indigenous Knowledge, Philippines for publishing this book. In indigenous life, food is no issue. We ate because we were hungry and we ate to have energy for the next task. Now it seems many people live to eat. So in the past, we, Igorots, planted food, not flowers. Our food was what we planted in season, or what our neighbors planted or what God provided in the forest, in the creek, in the river, in the seas. God is generous and certainly not monotonous. Food mileage – the distance from your food source to your mouth — was short so food was fresh and thus packed with nutrients. If not, it was preserved naturally — sun or air-dried, smoked or salted. These are what you will see in this book. The recipes reflect the diversity and bounty of nature. For example, the recipes in Apayao have coconuts as ingredient because it is warmer there and thus coconuts thrive. You don’t see coconut in indigenous recipes in Sagada and Besao. If it is mentioned in this book, it is modernized, not heirloom. These recipes also show what Judy mentioned earlier our forebears’ “mindfulness, creativity and resourcefulness” and I would add “patience and caring” not only for themselves but for future generations. Bamboo is used as a cooking vessel even at present in areas where it is abundant like Apayao and Kalinga. Gabi leaves are used in the intum in Lias, Barlig, because gabi is abundant there.
Congratulations to the project team for your efforts :
- to get recipes from the different ethno-linguistic groups in the Cordillera,
- for organizing them according to food groups, although if I were to do it, I would organize it by province.
- for narrating the context of some recipes like the linapet and patupat. Food and eating is intricately bound with life and can be appreciated better if the reader knows its context.
I wish, though, that the recipes have a brief English description in the summary list and that local terms are translated to English or its equivalent so that at a glance, I can choose which recipe to read and try. I also noted some errors in the terms and recipes, some perhaps are typographical. Like “inab-abesang”(Besao) should be “inab-abusang” and “kinnakey” should be “kineykey”. “Finurangrang” (Sadanga) is boiled diket and camote, not sugared camote.
Sugar is a modern additive. Indigenous recipes don’t use sugar because nature doesn’t provide sugar abundantly and that is the wisdom of nature. In the rice-camote recipes, the camote is the sweetener. Certainly, margarine, which is mentioned in some of the Ibaloi recipes, is not Cordillera heirloom.
When I was reading this book I was amused but at the same time sad, because it showed how “polluted” (forgive the term) our indigenous recipes are with modern and unhealthy additives like sugar. It also dawned on me how our young people nowadays and how even adults who haven’t grown up in the ili are unaware of this. This is where the danger lies if we insist that our heirloom linapet, for example, is sugared and so I digress and give a lecture. In rediscovering our indigenous heritage, we need to go back much more generations and analyse the context of our cuisine. Kaya nga healthy ang ating indigenous cuisine because it was low salt and almost zero meat and sugar. Why? Because salt was very precious- my grandfather had to walk days to Candon, Ilocos Sur, to buy salt. Meat, then, was all organic and thus very limited supply. Sugar was seasonal and raw (inti or muscovado). In my extensive interviews, men in Bontoc and Sadanga would rather make basi than inti because basi is basic in rituals and celebrations and inti is not. Further, the processing of inti is much longer needing more manhours of heavy labor and precious firewood. Diseases of today are here because we are putting sugar in almost all our food. And refined sugar at that (brown sugar is refined).
Back to the book review. The indigenous recipes in this book reflect the wisdom of our ancestors. The wisdom of our ancestors is the wisdom of nature. The wisdom of God, the wisdom of the Supreme Being. This is at the heart of our indigenous heritage. We cannot appreciate and reclaim these heirloom recipes if we don’t recognize and accept that a Supreme Being has designed nature as it is and that we just need to abide by it. Kaya noon, walang choice and mga tao kundi kainin kung ano ang nasa paligid nila. Now if we lose nature in our environment, then we are lost. From our indigenous sandwich called linapet, we have easily switched to hotdog sandwich – in the name of convenience and accessibility. Hotdog and bread are in the next-door sari-sari store while diket and peanuts are far away and may only be available in the Saturday market in Sagada. The sad thing is that many people don’t realize that hotdog and bread are not products of our rice fields and of our camote patches.
Because their environment provided them with sustenance, our forebears took very good care of their environment. See, for example, how they developed practices to safeguard water sources, forests and make rice paddies. It is “inayan” to pollute springs and to burn forests. Do people now below the age of 60 know these heirloom practices? If your food comes from the grocery or sari-sari store, would you care if the mountains are burned or if there is global warming? If your water comes from a refilling station, would you be mindful not to spray pesticides?
This book is a good beginning for a bright future. Let it inspire us to rediscover some more gems in our indigenous past and claim them. Let it spur us to action to showcase these heirloom recipes in our homes, offices, schools and organizations, that we all may be well. ***