Rant: Food Fight!

Post Reply New Topic

Me and my girlfriend often playfully quarrel on which cuisine is superior : Lebanese or Filipino.
Frankly it started when she expressed that she found most of our recipes "disgusting" and her cuisine is superior, even though she admitted she didn't even try most recipes!!
I noticed their migrant community are so...closed when it comes in trying the cuisine of the host country. They just want to eat their own dishes, their recipes, their desserts, and very few often try any other - and my girlfriend is no exception.

So I was like teasingly, "Well, the Lebanese cuisine is well-known worldwide, like the Greek and Turkish cuisines, but Filipino? Not much despite the large diaspora. This is when she felt she had to defend her national pride and started to list me some of their known dishes.

To be frank, I like a lot of Filipino dishes, such as Chicken Adobo and Tinola , but I don't much appreciate her total non-openess to try our food, she only tried Shawarma and Tawook and she loves them both (she eats one of those on every weekend outing) but she refuses to taste anything else. She doesn't seem to even like to try things like hummus and salads; she says she can't stands the "sour" taste.

And when she claimed that her cuisine is superior in taste than ours, then I had to give her a reality-check: Filipino cuisine is rarely listed among the tops in contests worldwide.

What I complain the most about the Filipino food is unbalancedness: The concept of raw veggies doesn't seem to exist in their cultures, they don't have any type of raw salads, their veggie-based dishes are made of overcooked veggies and legumes. There's way too much deep frying and pork in a lot of dishes, things like deep-fried crispy chicken are a staple of every Filipino feast.
Their desserts contain a lot of condensened milk, which is extremely sweet, like for example their version of Tiramisu and Leche Flan (their version of Crème Caramel) aren't things you can eat in reasonable portions because they're extremely sweet (just imagine a recipe that contains white sugar + caramel + two cans of condensed milk + riped mango on top and between layers). Even the Baklava is less sweet than a Filipino tiramisu, oh btw my partner never tried any Baklava or Knafeh or any traditional arabic sweet either.

Some of the few desserts I like their muffin-like "Puto" and corn pudding, these are very nice and aren't extremely sweet and they do have a distinct Filipino identity unlike the Tiramisu and Leche Flan which are modified copycats of others.

Their spaghetti....nope, terrible, they put sugar in the sauce and they use canned tomato (not fresh tomatoes) + hotdog (yes, hotdog), I prefer the genuine italian variation way more. Their "macaroni soup" is good though.

So yeah, she doesn't even like to try local salads like fattouch or tabboule which are....just typical salads. Our taste buds are too different.

At the end there was no clear winner.

I thought this was going to be about an actual food fight. Disappointing.

I know certain people who eat at places like McDonalds wherever they travel in the world because they don’t like trying different things. I don’t really get it.

She LOVES Mcdonalds, and her fellow filipinos seem to love it too (and KFC).

I don’t get it either.

My depth of knowledge of Filipino food isn't exhaustive, but a lot of it seems to be borrowed from other cultures (spain, portugal, china, a lot of different influences.). What Filipinos have done is put their own unique spin on different dishes, often making them sweeter in the process - or substituting locally available ingredients.

Does she like authentic Italian cuisine or does she prefer her take on it?

^ Her take on it.

Too resistant to try any other cuisine than her own.

She doesn’t even like pizza either, except the Hawaiian variation with pineapple (which is let’s admit it, an atrocity to pizza).

I can’t decide which is worse: pineapple on pizza or hotdogs in spaghetti. Hmmm…

My sister-in-law puts hotdogs in boxed macaroni and cheese. She won’t try anything she’s not accustomed to either.

I was hoping for This

Wish that Michael Bourdain were still around...so that he could be your marriage counselor!


Fun fact: the name of the band "Foo Fighters" has nothing to do with "food fighting".

"Foo fighters" were essentially the forerunners of ...Flying Saucers/UFOs/UAPs(whether theyre real or not). American servicemen in both theaters of WWII would see weird aircraft, visually and even on radar, that were neither "ours, nor the enemy's" and would have to learn to ignore them by labeling them "Foo Fighters". Other nationals on both sides of the war would see them too. Only two years after the war an American civilian pilot saw what he described "flying saucer like aircraft" over Idaho, and the modern era of flying saucers began.

Check the answers, so it wasn’t only me who noticed it:

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Filipino-food-so-unhealthy

I didn’t show her this link, I know this would wound her national pride.