Slow but sure

We had our first three-day Slow Food Travel way back in 2019. And to this day, we continue to conduct activities to save Cebu’s heritage food.

The first day was a promotion of the Ark of Taste products and heritage crops of Catmon. We invited our customers from Cebu Farmers Market (CFM) to travel with us to Catmon and learn how the farmers of kabog millet and cooks of budbod kabog were doing, then walked them through from planting of the ancient grains to harvesting and cooking.

We wanted them to know the history, benefits, values as well as the culture and tradition of the kabog, including the kabog dance, done when you harvest the now endangered millet grain.

As Catmon town is blessed with a lot of heritage crops, we also familiarized them with other ancient food like adlai, tinduganai, tinigib corn and the Catmon fruit, for which the town is named.

The second event was Sug-ang, where our local Cebuano chefs like Louella Alix and Ron Villavelez cooked Ark of Taste food ingredients. We introduced foods like takyong, local edible snails, known for their tasty meat. There was the elaborate dessert from ubi kinampay and creative ways of presenting tinigib corn. With our local chefs, we were able to show that local ingredients could be so tasty and nutritious. And that to support these kinds of food was to support a community of farmers and eventually save us from the threats of climate change, resulting in barren lands and famine.

The third one was the Slow Food Earth Market workshop introduced by Elena Aniere, our Slow Food coordinator. Our farmers and chefs were taught the importance of the SF Earth Market to continue providing good, clean and fair food. Educating our CFM farmers allows to them teach their buyers as well.

The last part was the symposium, intended mostly for young people to be discriminating consumers. There we introduced biodiversity, best practices, cooking of local endemic foods and the significance of Slow Travel, to meet the food makers and to have a farm-to-table experience.

In 2020 and 2021, with the lead of Terra Madre and Salone del Gusto, our convivium presented 14 “How It’s Made” videos on YouTube created by 12 convivium members/cooks, introducing the Ark of Taste products found in Cebu as ingredients for local recipes. It was hoped that consumers will realize and honor tradition and culture and be convinced of the importance of local, endemic food to sustainability.

There are also practices worthy to mention at the CFM pop-up markets. One is to try to utilize all possible produce. Leftovers are turned into tasty recipes by cooks; an energetic farmer turned leftover fruits and vegetables into kombucha and even customers who come late buy whatever is left to help their favorite farmers who have already become their friends or suki.

They voice their opinion against GMOs. They offer only biodegradable packages, promote zero plastic use and go back to reusable baskets when going to market. They begin to teach anyone interested how to grow the very vegetables they sell. Some consumers even consult about their farm or garden. Farmers help other farmers.

I realize there is more to just writing about what we do in Slow Food, and particularly in Cebu. Over time, promoting local, endemic food slowly changes not only the farmers’ perspective, but also shifts the landscape towards consumer responsibility.

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Aurora Perez is a member of Cebu Farmers Market, the Communities for Alternative Food Ecosystems Initiative and Global Seeds Savers. She is, first and foremost, a proud leader of the Slow Food Sugbu (Cebu) Convivium.