Sneak peek at Slow Food

It is the last day for WOFEX, the biggest food exhibition in town. It is also where Joel Pascual, the founder, gives us space for displaying Slow Food ingredients and even mounting small demos on artisanal salts, making kesong puti and having a tasting or sampling of local cacao and coffee.

Since 2015, Joel has been giving us prime space to spread the word about Slow Food. As a community geared towards awareness about good, clean and fair food, Slow Food Manila endeavors to share knowledge on forgotten foods like duhat, mabolo, kamias and other fruits in season such as santol and guyabano that young kids no longer see in fruit stands. Our members from other communities even send pili from Bicol (with pulp, with shell and just the white fleshy nut), white mango from Sulu, batuan from Negros, tabon tabon and sua from Cagayan de Oro and maybe some onions and garlic from Batanes.

This year, from Sept. 26 to 30, Slow Food celebrates in Turin, Italy. This is the bi-annual Terra Madre-Salone del Gusto where over 150 countries will be represented in showing off their almost forgotten food which are listed in Slow Food’s Ark of Taste. So this WOFEX feature is a sneak peek into what you could see in Turin next month.

But the two shows, WOFEX and Terra Madre, will not just be about forgotten food or those on the brink of extinction. It will also celebrate unique food cultures and traditions from every part of the world.  Think of Ethiopian coffee and how it is both a ritual and a coffee drinking habit. Think of pinikpikan of the North and tiula itim of the Tausugs in the far south. Imagine how salt is made using age-old processes like asin tibuok or asin tedted and the now getting famous asin buy-o from Botolan, Zambales.

At WOFEX, we are located in a public area at SMX Convention Center where you need not even buy a ticket, all because we want many people to know about the Slow Food movement. But we hope you will buy a ticket to enter the commercial areas to somewhat repay our sponsor for introducing Slow Food to you, for free.

The two venues are virtual playgrounds for budding entrepreneurs, expanding existing businesses and anybody in the food business. So make sure you go to both venues to get the best WOFEX experience.

How effective is WOFEX? Ten years ago we displayed adlai as the alternative grain to rice. Today, many chefs use adlai and many consumers watching their glycemic index (GI) also have switched to this grain, our version of South America’s quinoa. Now we find adlai salad, adlai risotto, adlai paella and many more innovative recipes using this grain. Though we do not want to claim its popularity, maybe our incessant promotion at WOFEX and other events made a difference. Given that successful formula, we are on our way to promote chong-ak rice and other heirloom varieties of our beloved staple.

Maybe because of our promotion of artisanal salts like buy-o and tibuok, our legislators went on to pass the Amended Salt law, allowing our salt-making artisans to be alive again. We almost lost our native salts because of an archaic law prohibiting the use of “uniodized” salt in the guise of preventing iodine deficiency in children. We almost got jailed for selling sea salt many years ago. Then, salt makers closed shop and we now import salt from Australia! Imagine that, when we have the longer coastline and lots of sunshine all year round. Thank God our legislators got enlightened about sea salt. Something we can do with our eyes closed because we have sea water and many salt-making traditions that need to be preserved and used these days. Slow Food can help in legislation because we want to preserve our food traditions and culture. Thanks also to the Creative Industries Act which now includes gastronomy and will save our culture. Thankfully, lawmakers like Cong. Toff De Venecia and Sen. Loren Legarda pushed this law to the finish.

Besides salt, we need to preserve heirloom rice and our rice terraces. Imagine this 8th Wonder of the world, Banaue Rice Terraces, being decimated because we will stop planting rice. That would be a sad state, given that we have many heirloom varieties – chong-ak, diket, jeykot, but alas if we keep eating imported or hybrid rice varieties, even our rice terraces may disappear sooner than later. Think about this every time you eat rice. Think about this every time you buy cheap imported Vietnamese or Thai rice. Imagine how you can save an industry, a tradition, simply by eating.

I can go on and on about local fruits. I passed by a fruit stand in Tarlac and had to search deep into the roadside shack to find atis (sugar apple), because it was being eclipsed by imported grapes, apples and oranges. In supermarkets we see more imported fruits because they can keep in cold storage for a long time. Think about it – when was your apple picked? I have visited cold storage facilities in Aomori, Japan where they keep these fruits for months before being sold. Not our atis or santol – they need to be picked and consumed immediately. And experts say if you consume fruits in season, Nature has made sure you are getting all the vitamins at the right time. And if you go through all the seasons of fruits – lanzones, avocado, watermelon, etc – in one year, you would have completed all your vitamin requirements for the year. Because Nature knows what to feed you. Eat fresh and eat local and our farmers will continue to harvest atis, chico, santol and macopa.

You are a co-producer. What you eat will be planted again by the farmer. Imagine saving our heritage just by eating the right food and making good choices. Business principles are the same – if there is demand, it will be supplied.

Eat local, whenever you can.