Surely, if my mother were alive today this means war. She was a gentle person but casting doubt on her way of cooking, like her adobong baboy with peanuts, would really agitate her into brandishing her sandok in protest.
We, Kapampangans, will not easily give up on our adobo recipes (yes, plural) being assessed out of national standard. On food, we are proud as in mayabang. We have adobong puti without soy sauce and bay leaf. We have several variations of that one with soy sauce.
We commiserate with the gata lovers of the South who prefer their adobo creamy. This might lead to demands for autonomous regions of adobo. One of my favorite restaurants in Barrio Kapitolyo might even go straight to Congress if one dares to use the name, Adobo Republic, for food politics. Yes, Pedro, there is such thing as food politics. Use Google.
Already, even 2022 wannabes are into it after DTI put up the target paper on the firing range. The news and the memes on the plan of DTI to standardize recipes for popular local dishes promptly made adobo the icon of the trending issue. My FB repost of a meme in Kapampangan elicited similar thoughts across regions and dialects.
My fellow Kapampangan, Tonette Orejas of Inquirer, reacted in our dialect with something brief that she wouldn’t use in her news feeds. An Ilocana colleague and former Secretary General of the House of Representatives, Atty. Marilyn Barua-Yap, threw in, “Kahangalan!” From the arts, another old friend from Laguna, Artistic Director of Dulaang UP Alexander Cortez, remarked, “Anu ba? Wala kayong magawa ano? Buti nga yang varied!”
A fellow Lone Ranger for good government, Ed Tirona, brought the issue to another level and commented, “There is an urgent need to trim down the Bureaucracy to a ‘lean & mean’ level to save collected taxes for more necessary undertakings for the public good. This DTI plan is proof that many functionaries are just wasting precious time and money in trying to find things to do. For that matter, there is no need for a large body of Legislators with nothing much to do but politicking and power-tripping!”
The DTI plan would probably not have attracted so much passionate negative reactions if it were announced under different conditions and at a different time. Standardization of commercial products is really needed, but I have serious doubts about standardizing recipes of popular dishes. It is the variation and the unexpected twist on the dishes concocted by enterprising chefs and restaurateurs that build the competition and promote quality and excellence.
They say it has something to do with preserving originality of local culture. On this I would rather refer to food historians like my respected Atching Liliian Borromeo of Mexico, Pampanga who has written a book on Kapampangan cuisines and heirloom recipes.
Finally for now, our collective reaction with the single-word remark of a retired official, Elnora Bernardino, whose son is a chef with his own culinary school, “Nge!
