We all need food… and coffee

There’s Coffee Day, Coffee Month, Teachers’ Day and even Chocolate Day and sometimes you wonder why these events are celebrated. One reason could be commercial. Like how a famous greeting card company created all the holidays (i.e. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc) so you could buy their special occasion cards! The other reason could be to remind people of the importance of a sector, product or industry.

Since “hard copy” or tangible greeting cards are getting out of fashion and social media greetings have instead become the norm, we no longer get snail mail but get barraged by greetings in various social media channels.

April is Filipino Food Month, according to Chef Jam Melchor, the founder of the Philippine Culinary Heritage Movement, and Oct. 16 is World Food Day. Truly, we need to have these celebrations if only to remind people of the lack of food or food insecurity and the variety of Filipino food, to show ourselves and sundry that we may have forgotten our heritage food which can feed us during crunch times.

These are the unpopular foods which we hardly see anymore – labong or bamboo shoots, ubod or coconut pith and ubad or banana pith. When push comes to shove, we can indeed “scrape the bottom,” so to speak, and find food if we wanted to, if we keep ourselves informed of our heritage and remember how our forefathers foraged to survive.

I am reminded of how foraging gave birth to the discovery of mushrooms and even the famous delicious French Perigord or Alba’s truffles. Who knows, we may find other edible stuff if we tried to forage. Foraging is not about desperation to find food. It can be a conscious effort to find the unusual, in forests and fields. I recently found sawtooth coriander growing like a weed in our farm. And recently we saw flowers from dormant seeds awaken due to our project to regenerate the soil.

Through soil regeneration – a conscious regeneration or its remaking, if you will – fruit trees that were barren will suddenly grow new sprouts and already fruit-bearing trees will just become healthier. The earthworms do all the work and it is just amazing to allow earthworms to do what they are here for – to go through earth without boundaries and work for you!

So, remember our heritage food (foraged food, too) and you will never go hungry, for life!

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We also have Coffee Month, celebrated every October as declared by the late president Fidel V. Ramos. It’s funny how today’s young coffee entrepreneurs think coffee shows and events are such a new idea or format to meet coffee consumers. We actually have been doing that since 1997, called Black and White (as named by the DTI-ICOCA then) and in 2002 entitled it Coffee Break when we became the Philippine Coffee Board Inc.

We changed the event name to Coffee Origins in 2007, I think, so people would get to know the provenance of the coffee – Davao, Benguet, Sulu – as popular origins of the famed beverage. And we did that until 2015 when we brought Coffee Origins to Davao, which is now a famous tourist destination for coffee seekers who climb Mount Apo to meet coffee farmers.

During Coffee Month this year, we will look back at coffee history by featuring historian Felice Sta. Maria, whose research reveals that coffee was first planted by a French doctor named Gironiere in the Philippines, and not by the Franciscan friars as we had always believed. We also found old newspaper and magazine ads on the entry of roast and ground coffee branded Chase and Sanborn in the 1930s during the American occupation. No wonder my father brewed coffee of this brand and other brands like Hills Bros. and MJB. And in the 1950s, with the entry of Nescafé and other instant coffee brands like Maxwell House, we started to drink more coffee as it became more convenient to prepare.

But take note that in the pre-war era, the government encouraged the people to plant coffee. And we are doing the same thing now, 100 years later. History truly repeats itself. There were local government efforts then to encourage coffee planting, whilst commerce also gave consumers many choices of how to drink coffee. It was of  Spanish influence which was strengthened by the American occupation and their introduction of “roast and ground” coffee, which made it convenient to cook or brew coffee in percolators, then transferred to silver urns used by Manila’s elite society. Very interesting revelations of the research made by Felice.

We will also look back at the post-war era and find out how coffee became an important export in the 60s and 70s and how the Philippines used import quotas to its advantage as a coffee exporter. But what happened after the glory days of export? You may find out when you listen in on the conversations between Manny Torrejon (40 years experience in coffee) and Michael Asuncion, a third generation coffee processor from the coffee-growing town of Silang, Cavite.

It truly is interesting to celebrate Food Month and Coffee Month, as it brings attention to two things we like to write and talk about: food and coffee. And bringing attention to such subjects wakes up the powers that be. We hope that local governments do their part in discovering their local food, as a measure to make their people more food-secure and not to worry about importation of the basics: onions, sugar and garlic. If people foraged in their backyards, there is natural food to harvest.

But sadly, people have taken to supermarkets for processed food and stopped looking for what grows naturally and is easily available – like papaya for tinola, for example. Local food tourism should start with the local people. Feed yourselves before you feed others. That is food security.

In the meantime, let me try another local coffee origin to celebrate Coffee Month. Maybe Sulu?