The American Dream for Foodies
Disclaimer: The contents of this article only reflect the views of the author. The writing does not reflect the views of AFS Intercultural Programs, Asia Kakehashi Project, MEXT, or The Youth Assembly.
Finally, I am back to writing a full-length article after a hiatus.
I started brainstorming in August the grandiose plan of writing an article about my journey in the United States of America. I was thinking about cutting it again to three articles, or just doing a short one. Also, I suppressed myself from posting a lot of pictures during my trip. Maybe being lazy is part of it, but I believe the majority of my decision to do so is that I want that trip to be more personal and intimate this time.
Unlike my scholarship exchange program in Japan, where I updated everyone about my everyday life and made my life like an open book, the 28th Youth Assembly — Asia Kakehashi Project Delegate Scholarship was purely unexpected. If I got my golden ticket to Japan through writing heartwarming essays and acing the scholarship interview, I got my golden ticket to the USA from academic writing through my capstone project.
Given the heartbreaks and worries that I had in my family after my maternal grandmother died, and also how the Philippines’ current socio-political climate burned me out of writing, it led me to a point where I asked myself to decide whether to represent my country again in an international scene. Despite this internal struggle, my love for my country resonates louder than my anxiety. This made my US trip my last teenage soul-search before I turned 20. It may not heal the wounds of my past, but it can give me answers about who I am today and what I want to do after.
Throughout my time in the US, there was one thing that made me excited for tomorrow.
It was not the networking aspect, because I sometimes tend to overthink whether or not the person that I met yesterday got mad at me if I did not say hello to them after seeing them again at the event. After all, I was second-guessing if they were the ones that I saw or not.
From East to West Coast and back, this article will all be about my experiences with the deepest American culture I immersed myself in throughout the trip: food.
Airplane food
This may not have happened yet on US soil, but let us start with a crazy anecdote of mine about my flight from Manila, to Narita, Japan.
It was poetic how my flight to the US was bridged by a layover in Japan. It was a message to me that my trip to the US would not have happened if I did not have the guts to dream about being an exchange student in Japan during high school. I even told Okaasan, my host mother, that I would say tadaima once my airplane landed in Narita.
It was all great during my flight, especially when I ate Japanese food in flight before going to a new continent that would challenge my palate’s accuracy. I also tried to speak Japanese again by interacting with the Japanese flight attendants. Asking for mizu was fine, but not until I started craving the mugicha that I used to drink in my Japanese dormitory after meals.
I do not know if they have mugicha on the flight, and I was a bit nervous to ask, which then gave me a mental block. So, when the flight attendant was asking me what drink I would like to have, I ended up asking for baaree tee, the Katakana pronunciation of barley tea. The attendant was confused; I ended up not having my last in-flight drink, but at least they gave me two candies before the landing.
To satisfy my craving, I walked to the other side of the terminal during the layover and bought it on 7/11. Problem solved.
Big serving sizes
The biggest culture shock that I had in America was the serving size. Now it makes sense why, in typical American shows, left-over foods are such a thing. In Asia, especially if you were raised in a working-class household, we tend to become guilty when we do not eat the food that we have on our platter. This led us to think of grace by making our stomachs full up to the desserts. We only have leftover food if we are in a group setting, just like what happened to me and fellow Asian delegates when Kuya Steven, a Filipino AFS volunteer based in the US, treated us with a whole box of pizza at Joe’s Pizza.
In the US, it is more of a hard task because their servings are sometimes twice the servings that we have back in Manila. My gut was so overwhelmed with the food sizes and calories that I ended up fasting not just to adjust my eating patterns but also to save up my money, given that I am not a heavy eater.
The worst food moral dilemma that I had was when we had free lunches at the AFS International office. They served us with salad, and I only ate half of it. This is one of the only times that I can enjoy a salad, but the serving size, plus the culture shock that I had with avocados being savory instead of a sweet dessert, blew out my hunger. I was so hesitant to throw the food away that I asked Cristina, our group representative during the event, if it was fine to do such a thing. Luckily, she said yes, it was okay, and there were desserts after the meal, making my mind happy for a while.
But after our session, my mind is running the scenario that if only my parents were there with me in New York, I would insist on taking the salad back to my hotel room and letting them enjoy the great food.
It was a hard time to let go of that guilt with the salad that I ate. I eventually realized that the mannerism of overvaluing leftover foods was more of an acceptable generational trait that I inherited from my ancestors, who survived hunger communally this way in the past.
Unbalanced tastes
American food is either too sweet, salty, or bland for my taste buds. The potato chips and baked biscuits were all too salty; I did not finish eating them. Because of that, I had the urge to eat Asian foods even if I was in the US, just to satisfy my taste buds, which wanted those spices. I tried to suppress those feelings in New York by buying pizzas or filling my stomach with the free DIY full American breakfast in our hotel.
Even with the famous food truck spiced hotdogs of Manhattan, my godmother, Ninang Rose, agreed that it is not fit for the Filipino taste palate, and if I wanted good hotdogs, I should try the ones in Coney Island. But, when I finally had the meal in Coney Island, I was a bit upset that the chili dog that I ordered was not even that spicy by Asian standards!
To top all of it, the most disappointing food that I had was the mac and cheese on our cruise trip around New York City.
Mac and cheese was the epitome of American food. Even Cardi B can agree with my idea since she put macaroni in a pot in her WAP song’s lyrics. As someone who loves mac and cheese, I was so excited to try the mac and cheese served at the dinner buffet that I put a lot of it on my plate and even sacrificed dancing on the cruise dancefloor for the sake of eating mac and cheese in America.
And I was heartbroken. Angry, even, that I sacrificed the dance floor at the very wrong time. The moment that the DJ was playing my beloved reggaeton songs, my soul was crying deeply after tasting the blandest mac and cheese I had put in my mouth.
While the other delegates were having their dance battles with Rave de Favela and La Mama de la Mama, there I was, at the corner table of the dining area, giving a great deal of culture shock to my fellow Asian delegates with how crazy I am of going to the dancefloor just to dance out my suffering to poor choices. Like what we Filipinos always do, I just smile at the pain and accept that the mac and cheese is a cross for me to bear.
Here Lies Laxative Jelly Beans
During my last night of stay in New York before I went to the Bay Area to visit my extended maternal relatives, I had the opportunity to watch the controversial Filipino Broadway musical, Here Lies Love, with Tita Jo, a great friend and a fellow PLM alumni of my grandparents in the Bay Area.
Before going to Broadway, I was deciding which snack I should bring, or sneak, inside. My first choice was Haribo, but I wanted to have an American immersion, so I ended up not choosing the German gummy bears that I adored. Instead, I picked the Jelly Belly Sugar Free pack that I saw next to the Haribos.
Now, as I laugh at how bizarre and absurd Imelda Marcos was portrayed while quietly eating the jelly beans, I notice that the candies are crumbly and not of good quality. I let it slide because I was more focused on how Ninoy Aquino was already tagged in the play as a Liberal Party candidate during his relationship with Imelda; in fact, he was originally a Nacionalista. It was also irksome how it was directed to a love triangle plot, with Inang Bayan being the collateral damage.
I still ended up seeing Imelda as a horrifyingly delusional narcissist, even if it was intended for the theatergoers to see Imelda as an average human like us. It is good that Here Lies Love shares how humans can turn into real-life psychopathic, egoistic villains. All the audience agreed that the Marcoses were disgusting, as people booed when the actors reported before the curtain call how the Marcoses were now back in Malacañang Palace.
It was also surreal to watch Lea Salonga perform on Broadway, but I eventually got lost in how unattached I was to some scenes and could not relate to the struggle it portrays. Maybe because the show leans towards lecturing the Filipino-American diaspora to never romanticize the Marcoses. I am not the target audience because I was born, raised, and currently living in Manila. Or, was it because, as I know, there are people more deserving of Broadway portrayals than Imelda Marcos? None other than the ones killed during the authoritarian regime, the names written in Bantayog ng mga Bayani, or even some unidentified fighters, or the Desaparecidos, who cannot even share the stories they had under the dictatorial family because of their absolute disappearances.
Comparing Here Lies Love with the more radical Martial Law-themed musicals that we have in the Philippines, like Lean or Katips, is like comparing apples to oranges.
I did feel that Here Lies Love is meant to be a light interpretation of the events that led us to the New Society, but we also have to accept that not everyone, especially the Filipino diaspora, is prepared to dive deep into the dark rabbit hole of this era. It is good that Philippine history is being showcased on Broadway. But, we also have to discuss after the curtain call how different historia is — the Philippine history written and sometimes heavily exoticized by non-Filipinos, from kasaysayan, which is made by Filipinos for the world to read and know about.
On the way back to Brooklyn, I told Tita Jo that, indeed, the jelly beans were not of good quality. She tried some and agreed to my judgment. But since I did not want to put the jelly beans to waste, I still ate them inside the Uber. It was the worst decision ever made, and this is why, kids, you should always read the package of whatever you are eating.
After eating the sinigang made by Tita Jo’s sister for dinner, my stomach started grumbling. From there, I know that the jelly beans are the culprit. I rushed my way into the bathroom and searched for the details of the sugar-free jelly bean that I had eaten. At first, I thought the problem was the freshness of the jelly beans because they were already crumbly when I ate them. But when I read online testimonies of other people having bowel problems after eating the jelly beans, the culprit is the ingredients that made it possible to be sugar-free. Because it is sugar-free, other chemicals that make its sweetener can have side effects as powerful as laxatives if eaten in large proportions.
I ate almost three-quarters of the jelly beans. I have a flight to catch at 5 AM, and my stomach is in pain. I do not know if I am being punished for eating a small snack in the Broadway Theater, if it was my unlucky day, or if I should blame myself for not reading all of the warnings and ingredients placed in the snack’s plastic.
I told Tita Jo about the problem and read the snacks’ content, and we both laughed nervously at how crazy and miserable I was going to be with my flight soon. She then offered me a banana to somehow prevent me from having diarrhea up in the air and told me to rest and drink lots of water. I took all the precautions, and luckily, the pain somehow stopped. But because of exhaustion and ditziness, I ended up forgetting some pointers that she told me to bring or do before I left New York.
And because I did not want to cause problems on my flight, I had no choice but to fast during the 6-hour flight to Oakland, California. Without food in my stomach, I was hangry, blaming myself for eating the laxative jelly beans that caused me to suffer throughout the flight. I even envy couples near me because either they are not single like me or just because they are happily eating their food in front of me while I am hungry.
It was a relief when my grandparents fetched me at the airport. I told them about the laxatives, and they laughed and pitied my flight experience and offered me snacks in the backseat. Thank heavens, it was the Japanese snack, Pocky, and an electrolyte-induced drink. I requested to have a hot soup meal for lunch, and they took me to a Vietnamese restaurant where I had the best pho in my life. Still contested though since I have not gone to Vietnam yet, but it is worth the wait to end my calvary on air.
Filipino Foods in America
As my family toured me around the Bay Area, I will never forget Lolo’s joke about Filipino Americans. Why is the Bay Area foggy? Probably because of the rice being cooked by Filipinos in Daly City. Maybe there was a birthday celebration in Daly when I went to the Golden Gate Bridge because it was all covered with fog.
It is only in America that they call Spanish bread, one of my favorite Filipino pastries, Señorita. To let me try Spanish bread in the Bay Area, my uncle bought them at a nearby StarBread, a Filipino-American bakery founded in 1986. I was amazed at how fluffy and fresh the pieces of bread were, which truly gave the Filipino panaderia vibes. I was also a bit jealous of how FilAms can enjoy the more buttery and soft Spanish bread variant, unlike in the Philippines, where we prefer it sweeter and moderately soft.
Besides the bread, my aunt brought me to Seafood City, a complex full of everything Filipino, literally. The best way to describe the whole area was to place a chunk of suburban Southern Metro Manila into Vallejo!
It is also in that area where we bought silog meals for breakfast. Unlike the garlicky sinangag that I eat in Manila, the sinangag that I had in America was smoky. I do not know if the sinangag in Seafood City is always like that, but it was so unique that the smoky flavor still sticks to my palate a month after I tasted it.
Meanwhile, the difference between tapa beef from the Philippines and California is more noticeable. Their tapa is more tender and spiced, but less acidic. Unfortunately, there was no atsara or vinegar dip in the tapsilog that I ordered to satisfy my standard tapa acidity level back home. My aunt also let me try the tocino she ordered for my uncle and cousin’s tocilogs. I was weirded out by how unsweet the tocino was by Filipino palate standards. I guess I am still biased toward the uber-sweet young pork tocino that I always choose whenever I crave tocilog.
Homesickness was nonexistent during my trip to the US because of the Filipino foods that I ate. I was amazed by how Filipino cuisine evolved in the US because of the large Filipino diaspora. It will always taste different from the Filipino foods that I adore in Manila since Filipino cuisine overseas is adjusted by the diaspora to further make it inclusive. Besides, whatever Filipino food that your parents cooked is always the best, so our judgment of Filipino food will always vary from each other.
Fast food mania
American cuisine is not complete without fast food.
McDonald’s is at the top of the list since Ronald McDonald is the most recognizable ambassador of the American fast food business. Like in the Philippines, you need to order via the giant touch screen a few steps after the entrance. They do not have rice meals, and their burger has the same taste as the burgers in their Filipino branches. I like how they claim on their plastic cups that it is the same cup model featured in various Hollywood films. Drinking in that cup while chomping the cheeseburger inside Lola’s car makes me wonder if we are already part of a movie in an alternate universe.
Speaking of cups, who will forget Starbucks and the status symbol of this drink in the Philippines? Unlike the coffee-crazed Filipino Starbs enjoyers, I noticed that Americans are more lenient in ordering fruit-based drinks and even tea. Because of this, I decided to try their fruit drinks, as other Americans ordered the same drink on Coney Island. I do not know if it is only a Coney Island thing since when I was with my aunt in California, we ended up ordering hot coffee in the drive-thru for breakfast, and when I was back in Newark to catch my flight back home, I ordered Doble Mocha Whip Coffee.
Even though there are already some Taco Bell branches back home, I still tried Taco Bell in the US for the first time. Their quesadillas were yummy, but they had almost the same taste and price as the local quesadillas that you will order in Manila. Besides Taco Bell, I also had the opportunity to try the American version of Auntie Anne’s pretzels. To change from the sweet pretzel bites that I am used to back home, I chose the pizza pretzel bites that caught my curiosity the moment I stepped into the shop. It was chewy, and the saltiness was just right.
The best fast-food restaurants that I tried would probably be Uncle Sharkii, In-n-Out, and Chick-fil-A.
Uncle Sharkii’s generous poke bowl serving gave me the same emotions that I had when I discovered the Japanese supermarket sushi I used to eat in Fukuoka. I was joyous that they served a balanced amount of masago with rice and scallops, depending on your choice of meal. The price was worth it, especially if you want a healthier and more balanced fast-food meal for the day.
On the other hand, In-n-Out Burger is more of a California-based resto. My aunt and cousins drove me to the nearest branch in their area after we had a great snack at Quickly with Boba Teas and Calamares. It was cool to know that my cousins have open secret orders in In-n-Out. Their orders are not on the restaurant’s visible menu; you will just tell the cashier the food’s codenames, and the cashier will know what food you want to order. What is the secret order so that you guys can also order it? Just search it on the internet, and you will be shocked by how many secret menus In-n-Out has.
Lastly, Chick-fil-A is the center of American chicken nugget culture. It is so popular that it broke the record for the longest drive-thru waiting time that I had in my life. My relatives and I ordered the chicken nuggets and criss-cross fries. It was yummy, especially the chicken nugget sauce. But I have to agree with my aunt’s opinion that McDonald’s chicken nuggets if combined with Chick-fil-A’s nugget sauce, are better.
Enjoy your meal
After a total of two and a half days of travel, I was back in Manila on the same day that Ninoy Aquino was assassinated in the airport: August 21.
Nothing gloomy at all; it seemed like a typical day in the airport. There was even a Rondalla band playing lively tunes at the arrival area to welcome the FIBA World Cup delegates coming into the country. 40 years ago, would there have also been a Rondalla band embracing Ninoy inside the airport if he had not been killed on the tarmac? Probably not, and his life will still be at risk once he leaves the premises.
What kind of spoiled adobo did we eat last time that our country’s fate became like this? Echoing the past, slaves to it, barely even moving forward in the best way possible. Is the Philippines just under a nostalgic fever after being food-poisoned a few years ago? Unfortunately, reality is not a fever dream we wish to escape by just awakening from it.
Being in the shoes of an American food gourmet ended as soon as I stuck the printed arrival stamp that I got from the digital immigration booth of NAIA into my passport. I am still far from becoming an accurate food media gourmet like the late Chef Anthony Bourdain or even local journalists like Jessica Soho and Kara David. Nonetheless, I was glad that I had enough time and support from my family and colleagues, who pushed me to keep on trying and eating foods that were not in my palate’s comfort zone.
I was tired, but not hungry. Full, but still yearning for more. I enjoyed the trip, especially the food, but it was only me who got full, while my country continued to starve from the scarcity of positive development.
It is ironic how rice was still not 20 pesos when I got back to Manila, and a lot of Filipinos are still leaving the country just to find ways to satisfy the hunger they and their families are having in this workforce-exportation-dependent economy that we have. No amount of pasalubongs from Overseas Filipino Workers can stop this endless hunger. Not just the gut hunger that 3 million Filipinos endured in the 4th quarter of 2022, but the starving desire to have a government that truly cares for the needs and aspirations of its citizens.
How we all wish that one day, the majority of Filipinos leave the country not because of the pressure and desperation to provide great food on their plate every day, but just for the leisure and laidback choice of exploring other countries’ cuisines with their families and friends.
Maybe in that way, we can continue believing that Filipinos and their love of food are all worth dying for.
