Bahay Kubo Notes And Rest Used
Paul
Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 6: Food and the Arts. A reminder of the season theme can be found here (though we are no longer accepting pitches.) All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is 600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and 300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack.
Around 2019, there was a moment in food and culture writing when there was widespread uproar about about the various things white people had stolen from the Indian subcontinent (tulsi, coconut oil, turmeric, Dev Patel). More than twice, I was asked to express my concern on these phenomenon, which I wasn't familiar with or bothered by because there were more urgent concerns than parvat-asana being messed with somewhere in the West; back home, the fascists had their knives to our throats.
Thankfully, preparing the nursery provided a soothing escape. With each stroke of the paint roller, I was bringing colour to what had been an austere room, bare of furniture and dressed in white and grey. As my work progressed, my thoughts turned to the stories I might read to our little girl, the songs I would sing to her. A tune started to form in my head, indistinct at first, but soon enough the words popped up and the song was fully formed in my head:
But perhaps the most extreme example of exploitative landlordism can be seen in the sugarcane plantation economy in the Visayas region. Although sugarcane had been grown in the region for centuries, benefitting from the rich volcanic soils, the industry was turbocharged in the 1850s when the British consul in Iloilo provided investment, enabling the local landowning elite to carve out vast plantations, or haciendas, of sugarcane from the rice paddies and virgin forests on neighbouring Negros island (which has now been quaintly reimagined as Sugarlandia).
This transformed a subsistence agricultural society into one dominated by cash crops for export. Both the locals, who were evicted from their land, and the migrants, who came in search of work, were barred from owning land and planting their own crops, and became dependent on Negrense sugar barons in order to survive. Situations like this continued into the early twentieth century, after the Americans annexed the Philippines in 1902; even after promising redistribution of land, the same legacy of colonial acquisition continued when the United States bought the support of the Filipino elite by transferring to them primary ownership of land in the new Filipino state.
Since then, the Philippines has been a country where hundreds, if not thousands, died of famine in Negros when the sugar industry crashed in the 1980s; where, in 2020, an estimated seven out of every ten farmers were considered landless; where deadly land disputes plague ethnic minority populations in resource-rich Mindanao and the Cordilleras; and where the longest-running communist insurgency in the world continues to be fuelled by rural inequalities.
Reflecting on this makes me think of my own varied, sari-sari family: of my dad departing England many decades ago to travel and work around the world; of my mum leaving the Philippines along with many of her family members, who are now scattered across several continents; of my brother, moving to start a family in Japan; of my wife, coming to the UK for new opportunities. And, of course, a product of these living interactions: our little Zo.
Mark Corbyn is an English-Filipino husband and father based in London, who also runs a Filipino catering business called The Adobros, doing supper clubs, pop-ups, event catering and private dining. Aside from all of that, he finds a bit of time here and there to write about what he loves - Filipino cuisine and culture - and has been featured in various food publications.
Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. Previous clients include Vittles, Hachette UK, Welbeck Publishing, Good Beer Hunting and the London Science Fiction Research Community. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li
Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 6: Food and the Arts. A reminder of the season theme can be found here (though we are no longer accepting pitches.) All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is \u00A3600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and \u00A3300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations, either through Patreon or Substack.
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Of all these contentions, the biggest one was chai \u2014 and there were demands for it to be \u201Ctaken back\u201D and questions about who it \u201Cbelonged to\u201D were constantly raised. Even if it may be true that chai does not belong to Starbucks, the idea that its ownership must be handed over to India as a whole is far from accurate. If anything, and if this proprietorship must in-fact be determined, chai belongs only to the indigenous communities who have been growing tea for centuries, exploited by British imperial landlords and then by dominant-caste Indian landowners and industrialists\u2014 all of whom have profited off their land.
In all post-colonial societies, these things that carry nostalgia - in and out of diaspora - are often buttered with brutality and complex intricacies. Mark Corbyn is aware of this when he writes about the Filipino children\u2019s song, Bahay Kubo. Through the song, which he heard as a child and now sings to his daughter, Mark outlines the history of land acquisition, language and power in the Philippines, and shows us how in societies where land and political rule are as volatile as the other, food is often imbued with violence and displacement; a dish or ingredient always means many things at once. Mark draws scenes filled with both beauty and pain, interwoven with contexts of the colonial and post-colonial Filipino state; and his own life in eating and understanding Filipino food and passing it on to his daughter. It\u2019s food writing of my favourite kind, the type which resists being consumed as easily palatable discourse. SD
It was the summer of 2021, and my head was swimming. We had a baby \u2013 our little girl Zo\u00EB \u2013 on the way, and there seemed to be an ever-growing list of things to finish off before she arrived. My wife and I fretted about what we needed to do to make our flat welcoming for a baby. And of course, there were doubts clouding my mind \u2013 was I ready to be a father, and would I be a good one?
The song was \u2018Bahay Kubo\u2019, a traditional Tagalog folk tune with a short length and simple melody. Its lyrics describe a style of Filipino country house with the same name, whose thatching is often made from nipa palm leaves \u2013 lending this style its other name of \u2018nipa hut\u2019. The walls of a bahay kubo are made from a mixture of wooden panels and woven material like bamboo, wood or leaves. They are supported and raised up by four stout stilts, meaning a ladder or stairs is required to enter the elevated doorway.
The vegetables mentioned in \u2018Bahay Kubo\u2019 are seen as representative of the produce of the Philippines. In 2016, Jordy Navarra, chef at the acclaimed Toyo Eatery in Manila, aimed to create a signature dish based on the song, incorporating all eighteen vegetables into a single dish. He told CNN Philippines that the dish is \u2018fun, it\u2019s playful, everyone understands it. All Filipinos know it. Ingredient-wise, it\u2019s very, very local kasi (because) all of the vegetables in the song are local\u2019.
The appearance of \u2018Bahay Kubo\u2019 in my mind surprised me, but it was quite timely: my wife and I had started talking about how we would teach Zo\u00EB about her Filipino heritage. And what better way than by starting with the song? Just about every Filipino knows it by heart, having learned the lyrics as a child, either at home or in school. I learnt it from our domestic helper in Hong Kong, yaya Rachel, who would often sing it to me whilst feeding me fried fish and rice by hand, kamayan-style.
As I sing \u2018Bahay Kubo\u2019 to Zo\u00EB, bringing to life the small nipa hut and the vegetable-rich patch of land it sits on, I can\u2019t help but think \u2013 who owns it all? The song presents an image of a rural idyll of plenty, but when set against the realities of a deeply unequal Filipino society, this presentation becomes far more questionable, masking the country\u2019s contentions of land, language and power that have deep roots, reaching far back into colonial times.
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