Why I Must Be in France

Is that a Monsieur or Madame Chicken? It's true what they say, the French are very picky with food. I first found this out while on vacation here a few years ago. I was grocery-shopping with my then future mother-in-law. "I'm going to cook you adobo," I said, walking to the chillers to look at the poultry. I couldn't understand what it said on the labels, so I was just poking at the yellow skin-covered meat, looking for a plump specimen, when Jeanette interrupted with, "Une poule ou un poulet?" I asked Pierre what she meant. "Do you want a female chicken or a male one," was the question. Glimpsing a future full of life adjustments, many of them small but with great potential to annoy, I sighed and replied, "You guys are really not going to make this easy for me, are you. It's hard enough with your nouns, but must your chicken dishes be gender sensitive too?"

Fish is a luxury. Back home, when you talk of food for the masses, you talk of fish, like tilapia and galunggong. Over here, if you have not much money, you're better off buying meat that in the Philippines would be expensive, cuts of calf or lamb maybe. One time we decided to make kinilaw for friends, and off I went to buy a kilo a swordfish. I still convert, so I gasped when I saw my bill: 25 euros. If I were still in Mandaluyong, those 1,600 Philippine pesos would have been a week's worth of groceries. Next time I'm serving them pizza...

Even their pigs fall under the French paradox. Reading Ianne, I remembered that in the beginning I'd cook Pinoy dishes and find them always lacking a certain something. My sinigang was not as tasty; my crispy pata lacking the pumuputok-putok goodness of the same dish back home. It was only when I looked closely at the pork offered at the supermarché and boucherie that I figured out why. Missing is that solid inch-thick layer of yellowish fat between skin and meat that you'd get at the neighborhood talipapa. Instead all you have are a couple of millimeters, meager little strings of white. What nonsense, I exploded. Whoever heard of pig, non-fat?!