The dreams of lovers are like good
wine
They give joy or even sorrow.
Weakened by hunger, I am unhappy.
Stealing on my way everything I
can
Because nothing in life is free.
Hope is a dish too soon finished.
I am accustomed to skipping meals.
A thief alone and hungry is sad
enough to die.
As for us, I am bitter, I want to
succeed,
Because nothing in life is free.
Never will they tell me that I
cannot shoot for the stars;
Let me fill you with wonder, let
me take flight
We will finally feast.
The party will finally start
And bring out the bottles, the
troubles are over.
I'm setting the table; tomorrow is
a new life.
I am happy at the idea of this new
destiny.
A life spent in hiding, and now
I'm finally free.
The feast is on my path.
-Le Festin, Michael Giaccino
Every time I go to class, I feel like going to a feast. My
disposition is very positive and excited. It’s not that I consider this subject
as an escape from all other subjects I take this semester, it’s just that I discover something new in
every discussion that takes place in the small space of D313. I love how
language was compared to grapes and wines during past discussions. Whenever we
press keys on the keyboard, our fingers turn into beautiful muses dancing on a
wine press in a celebration we share with our selves. Then we wait for the next
celebration, for when the wine finally ferments and is ready for others. We savor every drop of it, as we have done in
the waiting, before we let it let us be who we are.
Language is one thing we celebrate everyday. Language is a
feast, a smorgasbord of surprises, inviting our tongues to dwell in it—to
experience it and to live it. My chef brother once told me that the number of
dishes that can still be discovered is as many as the stars that can still be
discovered in the sky, and that is why gastronomy sounds like astronomy. I
laughed at him then, but somehow it makes sense to me now. Some dishes can make
us remember happiness or sadness or fright. Some texture can scare us to death on
the first encounter, some can comfort our souls in solitude, while some
titillate our palates in excitement. We sometimes judge by their color or
presentation before we take a bite if we even take a bite or sip at all. Some
food fool us with their appearance, some surprise us with their hidden delight.
Most of the time we look for something that isn’t there—that taste our tongues try
to figure out in confusion. Of course, we
have our favorite dish. We expect it to taste the same but there’s a different experience
every time we taste it. We also try to avoid eating it everyday, because it
might lose its power over us.
There is no standard recipe for every good food, we know the
taste by heart. The measures are like the language structures we have. They are
there so we have something to start with. If we stick to the taste preferred by
others, then we will never discover things unique to us. In my whole kinalas
experience, nothing was more sensational than discovering that supping beef
kinalas is best while chewing pork hopia bread at Gotobest, but I would never have
discovered how wonderful this new taste was, had I not tasted kinalas or hopia
before. On the other hand, I really could not tell whether the Couscous and
Ossobuco really tasted as they would in Italy when I first tasted them, but my
tongue loved them.
Tasting food is art. We do not gobble down food without savoring
the flavors. It is not just a pragmatic human activity—like eating in a rush
lunch break or feeding on a pack of instant noodles. That is why more than
eating or gobbling down, we savor our food by letting it dance with our tongue.
We chew it well so flavors come out. We
chew it well so the nourishment is easily digested and absorbed. Language is
like food, we may find a small piece of fish more nourishing than a plateful of
sweets. We cannot live eating sweets alone, bitter herbs and vegetables can
enhance our dining experience. The food can be bland but if it offers more nourishment,
sooner we’ll learn to love it and our taste will prefer it. Things do change. What
has been delicious before, might not be delicious tomorrow.
One thing I love about Naga is that there are lots of restaurants
and eateries that offer a variety of taste and culinary experience. Pancit
alone has a hundred—or even a thousand—variations; Kinalas is reinvented and
rediscovered every day; and the viands have the colors of fiesta. Compared to a fast food joint, where burgers
follow what the machine has programmed, these restaurants and eateries believe
that food must be made in the slow process of cooking, like boiling kinalas in
medium fire for many hours. You cannot just pressure cook the kinalas, else you
will lose the meaty taste embedded between bones and tendons.
This variety of taste that restaurants and eateries offer
makes you want to know the place further. Nothing excites me more when going to
a place than trying their delicacies and gourmet food. The lechon of Cebu,
bagnet of Ilocos, or longganisa of Lucban reflect the lives of people who have
shared them over the ages. No one can own the recipe of Kinalas, it is something
we Naguenos share. We have our share of personal stories of Tiya Kamot’s, Tiya
Ced’s or Tiya Cely’s Kinalas recipe, because Kinalas has limitless
possibilities of discoverable taste. We can always add ingredients to suit our
palate. We can always rediscover.
To eat Kinalas is a gathering, whether we are in Dayangdang
or in Barlin or even when it is served outside Naga. We will always find a way
to search for it and have conversations. Sitting in my brother’s restaurant in
Sta. Mesa, and listening to the words exchanged by customers amazed me. It was
like being in Naga. We are owned by our tastes, by Kinalas and by the language
we speak.
On the other hand, Sukang pinakurat tells a different story.
To experience that Visayan gourmet vinegar is something sublime, that even when
Datu-Puti mass-produced it, they could not copy the taste and experience. We
have experiences that can never be captured, simplified nor transformed into
something instant, just like an authentic emotion that can never be transformed
into an internet meme. It can replicate, mutate, or transform but it will never
come close to the original.
Just like language, food connects our tongues. We become
friends, admirers, critics, or connoisseurs because we have the power to
distinguish flavors and love the unique experience we share in dining.
Just like gastronomy, we do rediscover language everyday as we
give new meaning to an experience. Just as Chef Auguste Gusteau tells Remy in
Ratatouille, “Everyone can cook”, I say “everyone can say something new”. Language lets us discover a new dish or a new
taste we can contribute to the stars we’ve known in the skies. Let’s bring out the
bottles, the feast is on its way.
Kumusta? Nagkakan ka na?
Reflection paper for Philosophy of Language and Culture