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| Artwork: batanggala; Images:theinspirationroom.com, coulaslourdes.com, clker.com, flixster.com, utahstories.com, overgrownpath.com, arthursclipat.org |
Tyler Durden: We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.
Narrator: Martha Stewart.
Tyler Durden: Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha's polishing the brass on the Titanic. It's all going down, man. So fuck off with your sofa units and Strinne green stripe patterns.
Again, Martha Stewart- cook, artist, entrepreneur, innovator, prisoner. Now, that’s what you call a lady with balls. Man, if I were a she, I would be her. But, I reckon I don’t need some castration as lately, the dining table is slowly turning around as more and more hombre are staying in the kitchen more than the pub. Introducing a new breed of men- [drum roll please] the gastrosexuals! Think Gordon Ramsay or Jamie Oliver. You know, this new generation of men who can actually cook and uses their kitchen prowess and seduce prospective partners. Thus, a man donning an apron is no longer sissy but sexy. Woot woot.
Cooking requires high levels of technicality equivalent to getting a mathematical derivatives then solving for its anti-derivatives. It is very much similar to my Master’s subject on Statistics for Scientists and Engineers. I simply don’t understand it. The pros would tell you that when cooking, you don’t have to follow any methods to achieve such temptations to the palate, but that notion is pure bull. Cooking is both an art and a science. Indeed.
Now, I cook. Not because I think people will find it sexy, but life's circumstances coerced me to. Previously, I didn’t have to. My only affair in the kitchen was limited to cooking rice the traditional way- this I learned when our parents had to let go our 2 yayas in our pre-pubescent years. And with a brother who can easily do magic in the kitchen, I enjoyed the benefits of dependency. Unfortunately, the bloke had to join the en-masse Filipino diaspora to seek greener pasture abroad, or was it because Manila suddenly became too much for him? So, I was left to mind myself- to learn how to cook or feed myself with fast-food junk and a cupboardful of cancer foods a.k.a as Lucky Me pancit canton!
People have the propensity to think that I always struggle with food. Truth is, I do not. I grew up being happy with Cheez Whiz on my rice, or more often when time’s hard, lana-tawyo (soysauce and vegetable oil). I never complained. It was pure bliss, but when I discovered Purefoods’ TJs, it became the staple. But, as the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns would naturally occur, TJs eventually became boring. Thus, the struggle for my parents began who had to always sort what to provide me at the dining table. See, my mom is no Martha Stewart, but she was like Jesus in the kitchen. Imagine apportioning a pack of instant noodles to feed six hungry mouths! In the real sense of the world, it meant doubling the amount of the recommended water so it’d suffice to a multitude. Anyway, that’s what proletariats do.
Meanwhile, my dad thought I was an alien because I don’t eat what “normal” people do. See, in the abundance of seafood in our coastal town, I don’t eat any of it at all. Certainly, it felt different, but I felt good- it was I guess my way to seek attention and power in the whole social structure of the Erestain brood as a middle child. But, cognizant of the fact that lack of iodine can lead to goiter and strongly believing that it can help you raise your IQ to MENSA level, I’d secretly nibbled Fidel iodized salt lest I drop out of the honor roll.
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| Artwork: batanggala; Images: stepheva.blogspot.com, pinoygrocery.com, dryicons.com, amphi.com, flickr.com, thebignm.net, shutterstock.com |
The high sodium content in my body was probably to blame my recurring nightmares that I’d be dead by my 16thth birthday out of malnutrition. This fear was further exacerbated when a classmate-who-shall-not-be-named told me that she dreamed of me dying whilst having the prom, and she was shit-scared because she said all her dreams come true. That’s when I promised myself that every birthday I’ll eat something I have not eaten before- to survive.
I didn’t die. I was even the Mr. Senior during our prom. But, it’s not like winning Mr. Universe that it made my life more convenient. Uprooted from the obscure town of Gubat, Sorsogon to study in Manila, I was suddenly doused with the complexities of city life. And without your mom and pop around, life was certainly harsher. I remember during my days in UP when my siblings and I would pool what was left in our allowances to buy two packs of chicken skin chicharon along Old Balara and stretched this as viand for lunch and dinner. Or, the two times I had to ask for free lunch from Beach House Canteen because of my kumakalam na sikmura and I needed to nourish myself because I still had my PE class to attend. It was during these difficult times, that I thought food is not to savor, but as laman tiyan. Hunger makes you eat your pride.
Karl Marx would affirm. Poverty is oppressive. Not even a degree from the premier university in the Philippines could exempt me from joining the labor force. Like the rest of the hoi polloi, this whole seemingly impersonal forces dominating society has led me to the feeling of alienation of what I produces. Marx used two terms to explain this phenomenon: entfremdung (estrangement) and entaüsserung (alienation); these words are by and large interchangeable.
To quote Marx in his The Alienation of Labor, “This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.”
Further, “So much does the labor’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.”
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| Note to self: Cook |
That’s why one needs to create in order to claim his self and soul. And creative arts (i.e. cooking) are mechanisms in the fulfillment of this towards an idyllic life of leisure.
I may have started to cook para sobrevivir, but thanks to pareng Marx now I cook in order to create. This passion is intensified further by a strong envy on how these Junior Master Chefs on tv would whip out culinary extraordinaire at such young ages. At about the same stage, I was still not wearing underwear and my day’s composed of daydreaming on top of the aratiles tree and watching Kuya Germs or Heny Sison do some cooking on Negosyete.
So, cook. Create. And become a God out of your own mortality. Whoever you are. Whatever strata you are placed in right now, because:
“You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”
Wow, this is gem! Good writing there, Pat! :D
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