ILOILO City – To mark the recent Filipino Food Month, the Iloilo Provincial Culture, Arts, History, and Tourism Office teamed up with the Department of Tourism (DOT) in promoting Western Visayas’ cultural heritage and slow food ingredients.
“Part of the cultural heritage of our province is our indigenous food and our local recipes. We are trying to promote different recipes of municipalities,” said Iloilo provincial tourism officer Gilbert Marin.
As part of the Filipino Food Month celebration, select municipalities were tapped to conduct cooking demonstrations of their kakanin (rice cakes) and other delicacies.
Makers of baye-baye from the municipality of Santa Barbara were invited for a cooking demonstration to spotlight their product. The town recently held a Baye-Baye Festival.
Baye-baye is made of ground young rice mixed with grated coconut.
The municipality of Lambunao, on the other hand, demonstrated how to cook coconut balls; binayabsan nga baboy which is similar to pork adobo but mixed with young guava leaves; and tinipgang nga lupo which is usually cooked with the indigenous vegetable lupo, egg and tomatoes.
Featured also were the town of Balasan’s kakanin and ginat-an nga taklong which is made of native snail cooked with grated coconut.
Guimbal’s lauya, a vegetable dish served during Holy Week, was highlighted, too, along with suman and sinakol.
“Our local kakanin have a long history. We have a lot of kakanin-makers whose recipes came from their parents and grandparents,” Marin said.
He said some of the food could be existing in other provinces and not just in Iloilo, so they wanted to find out what their similarities and differences are.
Some of the kakanin were part of the photo display, together with Slow Food Ark of Taste ingredients.
“Slow food is a movement that originated in Italy, with a focus on biodiversity conservation and, of course, promoting endemic ingredients,” DOT regional director Cristine Mansinares said.
Aside from highlighting the kakanin, they would like to raise awareness, too, on the need to preserve the region’s endemic ingredients to help bring back biodiversity, she added.
Mansinares said they started with the inventory of slow food last year, covering vegetable plants, root crops, legumes, and even seafood.
Among these were the Criollo cacao, a pure cacao variety brought by Spanish friars to the Philippines in the 1500s; the batuan fruit which is used as a souring agent; the kadios (a variety of legumes), and the darag chicken which is native to Panay Island.
Mansinares said these products unique to Western Visayas could be the region’s competitive advantage over other places.
“We will consider this in our tree planting to promote species of trees, vegetables, and plants that are growing here,” she said. (PNA/PN)
