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123456 THEO 36i – Section Z Food Narrative From Remembrance The clock strikes—three o’ clock in the afternoon. Sunshine peeks through the blinds, gently nudging me to get up from my seat and head down to the sala. I rub my eyes, stretch my arms out, and leave my unfinished school essays to simmer in the back of my drowsy mind. The pitter-patter of my tsinelas draws my parents’ attention as they recline in their own seats by the couch. Dad, as if reading my mind, throws me the question I had on the tip of my tongue: “Oh, alas-tres na pala. Merienda tayo?” Mom follows up, “Oo nga ano—anak, gawa ka nga ng kape?” On slow afternoons, my parents and I drink coffee as our merienda. A brown brew topped off with a hint of sugar is how my family usually spends time together—and in the middle of it all is me, the family “barista.” While I do not claim to be on par with a professional one working in a ritzy café, I try my best for my folks. Whether it be in learning new ways to grind the beans or experimenting with coffee powder-sugar-milk ratios, I always strive to make a better cup with each merienda. But perhaps another avenue for appreciating the craft of coffee lies not in technique, but in remembrance. Preparing cups of coffee for my family during merienda is therefore not a self-contained activity when the act itself is a reenactment of the various external processes that first led the coffee beans to my home’s kitchen. The jar of sugar. A half-full carton of milk. Water, 18oz. The machine’s plugged—so is the grinder. And most importantly, the mugs: Mom’s “The Snuggle is Real,” Dad’s “Boracay Islands,” and my favorite plain old purple. I organize my thoughts and slowly check each thing off of my mental list. My body flies on autopilot, dancing the same dance I’ve always done; mine begins with a first move— preparing the ingredients for a cup of coffee. But just as a cup of coffee requires a certain flow of steps and a certain amount of ingredients, so does the very production of coffee likewise demand both process and ingredient. In this way, to prepare a cup of coffee mirrors the preparation of coffee.
With all the ingredients assembled, the next step is putting them all together. With a press of a button, rotating grinder blades hum to life with an electric zing as they turn a cup of beans into powder. After fifteen seconds, I add the newly-ground coffee to the machine along with 18oz of water. Bubble, blurble, and plop—the water slowly drips into the carafe. I wait, wait, and wait, all while leaning on my elbows by the counter: Did I put enough water for a cup of beans? Did I even get enough beans in the first place? On another note, how many teaspoons of sugar should I put in each cup? And what about the milk? The key to making a great cup of coffee is in the mix. More often than not, this step is done to taste. Some put a teaspoon of milk and a teaspoon of sugar in their cup, others love nothing more than a cup of coffee as sweet as chocolate, and still others, like my parents and I, want coffee with either one teaspoon of sugar, or none at all (but a teaspoon of milk is still my guilty pleasure). The plain truth to mixing these ingredients is to keep experimenting until you find your own palatable mixture—whether it be the most saccharine sweetness or the sharpest bitterness, to each mug their own. Where the mixing of coffee is concerned, the local coffee industry serves as a reminder that the Philippines is a net importer of food.1 On our own, we lack the required amount of preparatory ingredients needed to create enough coffee to sate our own consumption, but we must remember that such a statement is said against another backdrop of reality: the negative perception of agricultural work in the Philippines, where the average age of farmers is slowly moving past 57, where we treat the very work of farming with low regard, and where more and more people are leaving the agricultural sector, the country may someday end up with “land that no one wants to till, and no local produce to feed Filipino families.”2 Someday, we may no longer have anyone who wishes to even mix our coffee. The final drop of water plinks and then plonks. The coffee machine sounds an electronic ding—the coffee is done. I snap out of my musings and proceed to the mugs. As I grab the carafe with one hand and a teaspoon with the other, I gradually fill the mugs in front of me: “The Snuggle is Real” becomes a tad bit cozier, “Boracay Islands” a tad bit more relaxing, and Unassuming Purple a tad bit more special. As rehearsed, one teaspoon of sugar for Mom, none at 1 See Federico Davila, “Human Ecology and Food Systems: Insights from the Philippines,” Human Ecology Review 24, no. 1 (2018): 32. 2 ABS-CBN, "Why food security is a problem in the Philippines," May 22, 2015, news video, 2:50, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC0IRDDhz2M.
all for Dad, and both a teaspoon of sugar and milk for me. These are our cups of coffee: our own mugs, mixed to our own taste, and about to be shared in our own home’s merienda. It is a silly thought, but I have to wonder: what kind of canister was the very first cup of coffee taken with? Was it a wooden barrel mug meant for beer but repurposed for the at-the-time exotic drink? Was it a long ceramic vase that made it seem like there was an endless amount of coffee when you peer through its opening? How about this first cup’s taste: if the cup were a barrel mug, did the wood affect the flavor, and if it were ceramic, did the clay create a different taste? Although the question is whimsical, it hits deep into the experience of coffee. I am reminded of Norman Wirzba’s phrasing: “we can never only bite into one thing,”3 and in the case of coffee, we can never only drink the coffee alone. We always drink coffee with a certain worldview already in mind: it ought to be this flavor and not that, it ought to be taken hot than cold, it ought to be considered part of merienda—it ought to even be drunk at all. What coffee is, when and where it should be taken, how it should be taken, and why it should be taken have all been prescribed to us by definitions not inherent in coffee, but in what goes around coffee. As researcher Lucy Long states, “meaning is not found in the product (text), but in the processes surrounding that product.”4 And such processes, which fellow writer E. N. Anderson calls the interactions of individuals of society, create the “rules, customs, and other shared plans and behaviors”5 that we treat experiences like coffee with. Before we even directly experience coffee, we already metaphorically “cup” the coffee into our own worldview mugs. Each of us have our own personalized mugs: beyond “Snuggle is Real,” “Boracay Islands,” and Unassuming Purple, our individual situatedness within culture across time and geography affects our perceptions so much so that, as Long writes, how we come to give meaning to experiences can be either explicit, or implicit—we are not always aware of how we assign meaning to things such as coffee.6 3 Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4. 4 Lucy M. Long, “Meaning-Centered Research in Food Studies,” in Food Culture: Anthropology, Lingustics and Food Studies, ed. Janet Chrzan and John Brett (New York, NY: Berghahn, 2017), 212. 5 E. N. Anderson, Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2005), 5. 6 See Long, “Meaning-Centered Research in Food Studies,” 210.