Nostalgia foods

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

After reading that piece here last week on my visit to the farm where we had sweet pineapples that were allowed to grow without interventions like fertilizers and ripen on its own sweet time, Resident Critic had this to tell me: it is nice writing about those foods that remind you of your past, but do people really care?

Such a terse question really hit: what do people care about the tastes and flavors they haven’t really tried? It just occurred to me that people today grew up with their own tastes that define how foods mean to them and maybe, we are really just spoilsports in the scheme of things, oldies hankering for a past that will never come back again.

Who really cares, for example, how the iconic piaya should really taste like? It isn’t a crime to do piaya that doesn’t taste like what abuelita did, is it? Who gives a hoot if those native sausages in the market are pale imitations of what our mother served us? Is it really important to distinguish chorizo from longganisa, our tapa from the tocino?

Once, I bought plump chorizos that had too much sugar and preservatives, it took three washings – boiling it and throwing the water away – until it became palatable. I, who was raised eating chorizo recado, couldn’t take ultra-sweet variants of the native sausages. But what do I know, Good Friend Y buys this because his children lap it up.

But you get my drift, don’t you – one dish can be to-die for one man and poison for another. One dish can be memorable for one generation and what’s-that-thing-of-lola for another.

Yet, precisely because the generation that has the buying power dictates our food trends, there will always be a place of old recipes on our dining tables. Some call them “heritage dishes.” Others call them “nostalgia” foods.

These are foods that come from the past, the flavors of our childhood, the taste that brings back memories warm and wonderful. They have a certain powerful pull, a charm not everyone can comprehend but they are feel-good foods, and food, aside from nourishment, is really all about feeling good.

I’m sure many of our young people won’t understand why my friends and I would chomp on sugarcane instead of juicing it which is more convenient. More than the sweet liquid one sucks on here, “pang-os tubu” – chomping on sugarcane – is, to many of us, a ritual that brought us all, the town’s boys, together without the distinction of neither class nor regional differences. That simple act of peeling the sugarcane with one’s teeth, and crushing the juicy fibers of the huge weed to coax out the liquid in one’s mouth was one ritual that brought us all together.

I guess we cannot impose our preferences and gustatory biases on people. Yeah, what should people care about how the piaya tasted in yesteryears when they have their own standards and parameters on how it will taste in their mouths?

It isn’t exactly a crime that no one now seem to remember budyawi, little boiled fruits that tasted like giant soft grains in one’s mouth, much less where it is still available. And the sarali, those round grape-like fruits that one had to roll until they were soft before eating them – where are they now?

To each generation, its own tastes and flavors indeed, but how lucky we are to have had the privilege of having such a wide range of eating experience.

You won’t miss what you haven’t tried, true, but boy, the young these days sure are missing a whole lot.*

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