A2 · Elementary
9 min
food and culturelabor and economicscolonial historysoutheast asia
Rice and the Square: Food, Labor, and the Philippines
El Arroz y la Plaza: Comida, Trabajo y Filipinas
On May Day, protesters in Manila tried to storm the U.S. embassy over the Iran war and the rising cost of living. Fletcher and Octavio use that moment to dig into Filipino food: what it is, where it came from, and what it reveals about a country the world knows too little about.
El Primero de Mayo, manifestantes en Manila intentaron entrar en la embajada de Estados Unidos para protestar contra la guerra de Irán y el alto coste de la vida. Fletcher y Octavio usan ese momento para explorar la comida filipina: qué es, de dónde viene, y qué dice sobre un país que el mundo conoce poco.
8 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| arroz | rice | El arroz es muy importante en Filipinas. |
| comida | food / meal | La comida guarda la historia de un país. |
| precio | price | El precio del arroz es muy alto este año. |
| importar | to import | Filipinas importa mucho arroz de otros países. |
| influencia | influence | La cocina española tiene mucha influencia en Filipinas. |
| maní | peanut (Latin American Spanish) | El kare-kare es un guiso con maní. |
| guiso | stew | El guiso de carne es muy popular en muchos países. |
| isla | island | Filipinas tiene más de siete mil islas. |
There's a photograph I keep thinking about from Manila this week.
May Day, protesters outside the U.S.
embassy, and in the foreground, someone's selling food from a cart.
Right in the middle of the whole thing.
Eso es Filipinas.
That's the Philippines.
La comida está en todas partes.
Food is everywhere.
Seven officers were injured when protesters clashed with police trying to push through the embassy gates.
The demands were about the Iran war, about fuel prices, about wages.
But you can't separate that from food costs, right?
When fuel doubles, everything at the market doubles.
Sí.
Yes.
En Filipinas, el arroz es muy importante.
In the Philippines, rice is very important.
El precio del arroz es político.
The price of rice is political.
That's actually a remarkable thing to say, and I want to stay there for a moment.
Because when you say rice is political in the Philippines, you're describing something that goes back centuries.
El arroz es la vida.
Rice is life.
Sin arroz, no hay comida.
Without rice, there is no food.
No hay familia.
No family.
No hay nada.
Nothing.
I spent three weeks in the Philippines in 2004, reporting on the aftermath of a typhoon.
And I remember a woman in a small village in Leyte who showed me her rice supply like it was a bank account.
Every grain counted.
En Filipino, la palabra para comer es 'kain'.
In Filipino, the word for 'eat' is 'kain'.
Pero también significa 'comer arroz'.
But it also means 'eat rice'.
Es la misma palabra.
It's the same word.
The language itself encodes the dependence.
If you haven't eaten rice, you haven't eaten.
That's a level of cultural specificity I find genuinely fascinating.
La comida filipina tiene muchas influencias.
Filipino food has many influences.
España, China, América.
Spain, China, America.
Todo está ahí.
It's all there.
Three hundred years of Spanish colonization followed by fifty years of American rule.
That's a lot of culinary history sitting on one plate.
El adobo es el plato más famoso.
Adobo is the most famous dish.
Carne con vinagre y soja.
Meat with vinegar and soy sauce.
Es muy bueno.
It's very good.
Now, for listeners who've only heard 'adobo' in a Mexican context, this is a completely different thing.
Filipino adobo is a cooking method, not a spice paste.
Vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, bay leaf.
It's brilliant, actually, because vinegar preserves the meat in tropical heat.
Exacto.
Exactly.
No hay frigorífico.
There's no refrigerator.
El vinagre es el frigorífico.
The vinegar is the refrigerator.
Food as technology.
I love that framing.
And when you think about it, that's what most traditional cuisines actually are.
Solutions to practical problems.
En Filipinas hay más de siete mil islas.
In the Philippines there are more than seven thousand islands.
Cada isla tiene su propia comida.
Each island has its own food.
Seven thousand islands.
That's a number I know intellectually, but it doesn't really land until you think about what it means for culture.
Seven thousand local cuisines, more or less.
En el norte comen más verduras.
In the north they eat more vegetables.
En el sur, más especias.
In the south, more spices.
En Manila, todo.
In Manila, everything.
Manila as culinary crossroads.
That tracks.
When I was there, I ate at a carinderia, one of those small neighborhood restaurants, and the woman running it had dishes from three different regions on the same menu.
La carinderia es muy importante.
The carinderia is very important.
Es la comida del pueblo.
It's the food of the people.
No del restaurante caro.
Not of the expensive restaurant.
Which brings us back to May Day.
The people at that protest, the ones clashing with police outside the embassy, they're not eating at expensive restaurants.
They're eating at carinderias.
And when fuel prices spike because of a war in the Persian Gulf, the carinderia owner raises prices, and suddenly the people who can least afford it are squeezed hardest.
Sí.
Yes.
La guerra está lejos.
The war is far away.
Pero el precio del arroz está aquí.
But the price of rice is here.
En tu plato.
On your plate.
There's a kind of brutal clarity in that.
The geopolitics reach you through the grocery bill.
Filipinas importa mucho arroz.
The Philippines imports a lot of rice.
Cuando el precio sube en el mundo, Filipinas tiene un problema grande.
When the global price rises, the Philippines has a big problem.
And this is actually a relatively recent vulnerability.
For most of its history, the Philippines was rice self-sufficient.
The Cordillera rice terraces in northern Luzon are two thousand years old.
They're a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Ifugao people built an irrigation system across the mountains that is, honestly, one of the most extraordinary feats of pre-industrial engineering on the planet.
Pero ahora hay muchas personas en las ciudades.
But now there are many people in the cities.
El campo produce menos.
The countryside produces less.
Y la población es grande.
And the population is large.
A hundred and fifteen million people, roughly.
It's one of the most densely populated countries in Southeast Asia.
And urbanization pulled labor away from farming, same story we've seen everywhere.
Y hay otro problema.
And there's another problem.
Los tifones destruyen los campos de arroz todos los años.
Typhoons destroy the rice fields every year.
Climate as a constant tax on food security.
The Philippines sits in the Pacific typhoon belt, hits about twenty major storms a year, and every one of them can wipe out a harvest.
The farmers rebuild, plant again, and then you add rising global food prices on top of that cycle, and you understand why people end up outside an embassy demanding something change.
Hay una comida famosa del sur: el kare-kare.
There's a famous dish from the south: kare-kare.
Es un guiso con maní.
It's a stew with peanuts.
Es muy especial para las familias.
It's very special for families.
Kare-kare.
I have eaten that dish and it is extraordinary.
Oxtail, tripe, vegetables, thick peanut sauce.
And you always serve it with bagoong, which is fermented shrimp paste.
The contrast between the rich, almost sweet peanut sauce and that intensely salty, funky shrimp paste is, I mean, it shouldn't work and it absolutely does.
Ahora tienes hambre, Fletcher.
Now you're hungry, Fletcher.
I am absolutely hungry.
It's eleven in the morning and I'm thinking about oxtail stew.
This is your fault.
La cocina española tiene mucha influencia en Filipinas.
Spanish cuisine has a lot of influence in the Philippines.
El arroz valenciano, el sofrito, los nombres.
Valencian rice, sofrito, the names.
Three centuries will do that.
There's a Filipino dish called arroz caldo, which is essentially congee but with the Spanish name for rice.
There's a whole category of Spanish-named dishes that have been completely transformed by local ingredients and techniques.
The Spanish name is almost a fossil record.
Sí.
Yes.
La comida guarda la historia.
Food keeps history.
Mejor que los libros.
Better than books.
That might be the truest thing either of us says today.
You can rewrite a history textbook;
you can't rewrite what a grandmother puts on the table.
Hay también la influencia americana.
There's also the American influence.
Los filipinos comen mucho pollo frito.
Filipinos eat a lot of fried chicken.
Y mucho pan de molde.
And a lot of sliced bread.
Fifty years of American rule left fried chicken and Wonder Bread.
That's a complicated legacy to sit with.
Though I'd note that Filipino fried chicken is considerably better than anything I grew up eating in Texas.
Jollibee es más popular que McDonald's en Filipinas.
Jollibee is more popular than McDonald's in the Philippines.
Eso dice mucho.
That says a lot.
Jollibee is one of the more remarkable business stories in Asian food.
A Filipino fast-food chain that beat McDonald's in its own country and now has locations in the United States, in the Middle East, in Europe.
It's a cultural confidence statement as much as it is a hamburger.
Y los filipinos en el extranjero comen en Jollibee para recordar su casa.
And Filipinos abroad eat at Jollibee to remember home.
Which brings in another layer of this story.
The Philippines has one of the largest diaspora populations in the world.
Roughly ten million Filipinos work abroad, and the money they send home accounts for almost ten percent of the country's GDP.
Food becomes a way of holding onto an identity you've had to carry across an ocean.
Oye, Fletcher.
Hey, Fletcher.
Antes dijiste 'maní'.
You said 'maní' earlier.
¿Sabes que en España decimos 'cacahuete'?
Do you know that in Spain we say 'cacahuete'?
I learned 'maní' because Octavio, you corrected my Spanish once in Buenos Aires and I genuinely cannot remember what you replaced.
What's the difference?
En España decimos 'cacahuete'.
In Spain we say 'cacahuete'.
En América Latina dicen 'maní'.
In Latin America they say 'maní'.
Las dos palabras son correctas.
Both words are correct.
Son diferentes países.
They are different countries.
So 'maní' is the Latin American Spanish word and 'cacahuete' is the Castilian version.
Same thing, two names depending on where you are.
That's exactly what we were talking about with Filipino food, actually.
Same underlying reality, different names depending on who arrived and when.
Sí.
Yes.
Y 'cacahuete' viene de la palabra náhuatl 'cacahuatl'.
And 'cacahuete' comes from the Nahuatl word 'cacahuatl'.
Del México antiguo.
From ancient Mexico.
El español también tiene mucha historia.
Spanish also has a lot of history.
So a word that came from the Aztec language, traveled to Spain with the conquistadors, became standard Castilian, and then a different version crossed the Pacific to the Philippines and Latin America.
The entire colonial era in one peanut.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y en Filipinas, ese maní está en el kare-kare.
And in the Philippines, that peanut is in the kare-kare.
Todo está conectado.
Everything is connected.
Everything is connected, through food, through language, through the fact that people on a street in Manila in 2026 are angry about a war they didn't start but are paying for with every meal.
That feels like a good place to land.