Iloilo: Nature, Culture, and Geography

I wrote a chapter for an internationally released volume, Mata-Codesal and Abranches, Food Parcels in international Migration, 2017 The title of the chapter was "When objects speak louder than words: food, intimacy, and power in the  contemporary transnational household. My interest in food and culture was clearly shaped by ideas l engaged with. I opened the chapter with a note on how the late Filipino (and Ilongga) food scholar Doreen Gamboa Fernandez thought of food as an accessible point of entry into Philippine culture and history (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on Fernandez 2003, 58).Fernandez herself thought of food as a means of acquiring a sense of identity, As an aspect of everyday lite, it serves as a mirror we could hold up to ourselves, '[offering] an opportunity for selt-knowledge... grounded in immediate experience, embodied knowledge, and personal and collective memory (60), To a group of llonggo OFWS in Hong Kong sharing a meal of pinamarhan and steamed rice, food is not just su