Milk at midnight
and other myths

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

On one midnight flight to Manila,  I found  myself eating sweet mango and sticky rice cooked in coconut milk, the Thai version of our ibus, that was served with a small cup of fresh coconut milk. It was delicious and filling, especially after standing for an hour in an immigration line that snaked 15 times, and running to one’s boarding gate with barely 10 minutes to boarding time.

But I found myself smiling, not exactly at having to eat this sexy ibus thousands of miles above sea level but at the thought of how globalization has torn down, not just trade and economic barriers, but cultural walls as well.

Look, lola, I am eating gata, fresh, sinfully thick coconut milk,  at 12 midnight! Time was when the idea of  eating even just something that had coconut milk in it after sundown was taboo , and here I was drenching finger-size ibus with the luxurious but forbidden liquid in the dead of the night.

I don’t know what logic there was in that belief, but I was told my stomach cannot handle it, and can I please just shut up and follow?  Elders always know best.

And so I grew up regarding coconut milk as an uncooked food, like rice grains, that needed to be subjected to heat before it can be eaten, until somebody served me – I think in Mrs. T’s restaurant along 6th street before – guinumis, flattened rice grains in coconut milk. That was how I discovered the luscious pleasures of the forbidden – okay, it was  one of the many epiphanies – a love affair with fresh coconut milk that was forever sealed in Bangkok where they put fresh coconut milk in almost every other dish, from appetizers to desserts.

There are other eating taboos I grew up with which I understand continues to persist in some areas, and broken in others. Taboo: fruits and vegetables at night. For the same reason as the gata ban – your stomachs can’t handle them --  our grandmothers told us not to eat fruits and vegetables at night, as if our intestines knew which hour it was. And look how we’re  now serving salads and fresh fruits for dinner.

Another belief I was raised in was to always eat fish with rice, otherwise, I’ll grow worms in my stomach like the children in the shorelines. I’ve actually seen a lot of sallow-skinned children with bloated stomachs living near the seas, and I have always associated this with eating more fish than rice. Of course there is really no truth nor logic there; I think it was just mother’s way of stretching the budget. Rice was always available, but the budget for fish and meats was  not unlimited so she had to encourage us to always eat rice and go slow on the fish and meats. Kan-on-all-you-can, I now realize, started in my family’s dinner table.

I guess somewhere there, cultural taboos had their beginnings and bases, from one mother’s creative way to make both ends meet to I don’t know what. But I am sure taboos came to be because of some need to appease -- perhaps one’s budget demands or one’s gods. Most Catholics and Christians, if you get down to it, have a special, albeit unconscious, regard, even respect, for fish, and you can trace this to how fish figures prominently in the Bible. Of course there are also those who associate it with deprivation, as in meatless Lent.

Indeed, food is more than just fuel for our stomachs. As we are now discovering, it is one repository of cultural values and beliefs, a keeper of  the past in fact, more effective than oral history because we do not just keep it in our memories but in fact ingest it in our stomachs and keep it in our hearts. *

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