Slow Food at the farm

I recently hosted a diverse group of women – my sorority sisters – who wanted to see our herbal garden and coffee farm. Their ages ranged from 40 to 70 years old, with different ideas about living life. Surprisingly, the youngest one was the pescatarian while the older ladies were noshing on potato chips, wanted soda drinks and were eating away while chatting about their grandkids and families. I put my foot down as the host that they could only drink fresh buko and coffee.

So I entertained the older ones and gathered them in the kubo to share stories about Slow Food and its principles of eating good, clean and fair food. I also told them that they all have a choice of living to 100, or eating like there is no tomorrow. I then shared with them the famous quote “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” While carefully avoiding to pontificate, I entertained questions why heirloom rice is better to eat than white imported rice; why VCO is better than palm or canola oil; how herbs and weeds can be medicinal and edible.

The younger ones, meanwhile, hied off to the bigger farm, a coffee farm, where they traipsed amongst pandan grass, checked out the fruit forest and learned how coffee fruits become seeds, seedlings and finally a tree which will then bear more fruits. They saw how organic fertilizer is made by our best workers – the earthworms! When they came back to have lunch, they had their harvests of pandan bunches and were full of realizations about coffee and organic farming.

After a heavy lunch, it was time to nap or have coffee – two opposite activities as coffee will surely keep some awake while others took power naps even after having coffee. The heat and the humidity must have sapped their energy while hiking over rolling terrain, and despite having a cold buko drink at the end of the tour.

Women will always find pleasure shopping on tours, chatting with friends they have not seen face to face in two years and some will want to be entertained with even more information about how we set up the farm. Not a few wanted to learn more about coffee as I asked them to please take it black and not add any sweetener. Questions were raised about Bulletproof coffee and Peaberry coffee, while a scientist in the group explained about Medium Chain Triglycerides (MCT) in virgin coconut oil.

And this is how reunions will be like as we avoid being in crowds and would much prefer to walk around in a farm and dine al fresco. Communing with Nature is something we can do. We can go on farm tours, garden visits and other trips in the great outdoors. We never planned to be a tourist destination or be a resort as we have been farming only for family consumption even before the pandemic. You can say we walk the talk and we have been doing it that way even before we shared the mantra “grow your own food.” Every week, we enjoy harvesting bananas and coconuts, a few kilos of vegetables and fruits that are in season. We can get banana hearts, banana trunk and other produce that we can use to prepare food at home.

These 24 women, with diverse careers and educational degrees, could be advocates for Slow Food, growing coffee and starting small family farms. I was only too happy to answer all the questions they had, with eyes gleaming with excitement over herbs and little pots of plants they can start to grow. While sharing our story with them, I realized they all wanted to learn from our experience while sharing what their families also know about local cuisine and food culture. It was an active exchange much like a discussion in school, where scientists, horticulturists and women of various persuasions asked, shared and even challenged some ideas about food and coffee, among others.

One Cebuana shared that she grew up eating local corn, and babies eating a finely ground maize called “binlud.” This could be a solution to the rice crisis – going back to native corn as the Cebuanos did and learning to not depend on rice alone.

Someone from the south shared about Tabon-Tabon, a fruit they use for making kinilaw that the others never heard of. Another woman spotted our kamias tree and shared about souring ingredients from North to South such as batuan from Negros.

All these ingredients are actually part of a catalog that Slow Food has been archiving called the Ark of Taste (www.fondazioneslowfood.org) where our local heirloom rice, Barako coffee, kamias and tabon-tabon are listed. And to date we have only nominated over 60 products and we could use more. We have listed fruits like marang, duhat and aratiles. Why is it important for us to discuss these seemingly ancient ingredients? Because when we stop talking about them, the consumers will also forget they exist. And if the consumers don’t know them, the farmer stops planting them. And that fruit or vegetable could be gone forever.

Twenty-four different women, twenty-four ideas of how to enjoy a farm tour. But with the seeds we have planted in each others’ minds, we know that the ideas will multiply and maybe we will find more advocates who will help preserve our duhat, our kamias and our batuan.

What have you not tasted yet among our native fruits? If you find a duhat or avocado in season, let your children and grandchildren experience them, too. Sharing it on the family table could be one way of preserving our food culture and our soul as a Filipino people.