About

Halo-Halo Ecologies

A transnational workshop on emergent Philippine environments and foodways

 

Acclaimed Filipino food scholar Doreen G. Fernandez once wrote that “In the act of eating, we ingest the environment.” In the everyday practice of eating, however, food can be easily disembodied from its environmental underpinnings, even as writers like Fernandez serve up its cultural and historical bearings. Take halo-halo, the iconic crushed-ice dessert beloved by many. Food writing frequently describes this midday treat as a colourful assortment of local and foreign ingredients now considered prototypically Pinoy. Rarely, however, is this concoction understood as a material product of Philippine ecosystems that is, as an eclectic blend of environmental tales in an ever evolving and highly politicized Philippine foodscape. Crushed ice, for instance, might tell the story of urban Manila’s classed transformations with the democratization of refrigeration technologies. Evaporated milk betrays tales of colonial ranching, the supplanting of local carabao-centered cultures, and shifting human-animal relationships with military incursion. Tropical fruit toppings like mangoes, bananas, and jackfruit are windows into the rise of plantation agriculture and the scientific management of Mindanao’s landscapes. And ube, the purple tuber world-famous as comfort food for the diaspora and as a social media phenomenon, has become a harbinger of climate change to the farmers of the Cordilleras.

The “Halo-Halo Ecologies” Workshop endeavors to explore the intersection of food and environment by bringing together a transnational community of scholars, writers, activists, and food enthusiasts from the Philippines and the diaspora. We invite papers on any Filipino food item or practice, mundane or iconic, that combines the cultural commitments of food writing with attention to agrarian, marine/maritime, or urban-ecological issues. We hold that the Philippines and its diasporic networks are exemplary sites through which to examine this topic. In recent years, Filipino and Filipinx American cuisine has gained substantial interest in cosmopolitan cities around the world. With labor as one of the top exports of the country, the palate has diffused widely to influence global spaces of food production and consumption. This wave of interest and influence presents an opportunity to combat the selective fetishization of Filipino/Filipinx culinary culture and to reveal emergent food and environmental issues that have propelled the archipelago into the global limelight. Home to 18 of the world’s mega-biodiverse sites and some of the most productive fishing grounds in the coral triangle, the Philippine archipelago’s sites of production and harvest lie at the junctions of competing geopolitical interests and conservation agendas. Ever expanding frontier lands have paved the way for the emergence of a vibrant agrarian society, as well as for a “protracted war” in what is widely known as Asia’s longest-running communist insurgency. Centuries of involvement in the exchange of food commodities with the Asia-Pacific and the Atlantic world has turned the Philippines into a formative hub not only for national culinary traditions, but also for illegal wildlife trade. In the Cold War period, the archipelago became a pivotal testing ground for the modernization and industrialization of foodways in other geographies as well. The high-yielding varieties of rice developed during this period serve both as a parable of the successes of green revolution biotechnologies and a cautionary tale of an agricultural powerhouse’s fall to the status of permanent net food importer. Today, the Philippines’ claim to its position among the top exporters of coconuts, bananas, pineapples, and coffee has been accompanied by violent clashes, earning it the title as the “deadliest country for environmental defenders” in 2019.  

More importantly, Philippine foodways and the environments it depends on are at risk. Indeed, if Doreen Fernandez, writing in 1993, suggested that “If we can savour the word, we can swallow the world,” then ‘swallow the world’ we have! Increasingly we see coastal and marine biodiversity threatened to extinction, soils overutilized to the point of exhaustion, frontier lands deforested, agricultural lands converted to urban and suburban spaces, farmers and fisherfolks forced to migrate and abandon their livelihoods, and indigenous cultures allowed to fade away; all these trends unfold as demand for food reaches new heights in the cosmopolitanizing and hyperconsuming cities of the Philippines. Meanwhile, extreme weather events such as typhoons and droughts, which scholars predict will become more intense and frequent in the future, are feared to exacerbate food insecurity in rural and urban communities. The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food provisioning is an ominous sign of how vulnerable the Philippine food and agriculture systems are to crisis. Furthermore, the current political climate in the Philippines imbricates with global forces to further exacerbate risks, as we see with the rise of conflict in sites of food production and the number of environmental activists and indigenous leaders murdered. 

What is at stake with the dramatic changes in configurations of land, landscape, labor, livelihood, and culture that have come to define Filipino/Filipinx life as we know it? These environmental perils compel us to reimagine what, how, and why we eat; what openings become newly available for political change? We cannot begin to address these questions, or to meaningfully consider their implications for policy and practice, without scholarship that creatively combines critical studies on food and on the environment. We find that the most powerful contributions to Filipino/Filipinx cultural studies trace culinary or gastronomic identity formation to the legacies of colonialism, militarism, and capitalism, as well as their respective environmental underpinnings. Conversely, we see the most forceful contributions to studies of the Philippine environment in works that link agrarian transformations with the development of core Filipino social institutions around class, gender, race, and ethnicity. We stand on the shoulders of scholars who have used the Philippine context to inform global theories of the state, agrarian reform, protest and counter-revolution, rural class dynamics, gastronomic culture, and beyond. We hope to build a community of emergent scholars likewise committed both to situated and outward-looking scholarship, while also invested in the intellectual projects of decolonization, intersectionality, indigenizing knowledge, more-than-human methodologies, diasporic connections, and scholarship-activism. 

Our main goals for this workshop are to a) create a transnational community of Philippines and Filipino/x Studies scholars, writers, activists, and food enthusiasts interested in these issues, b) to map the contemporary body of literature on food and environment on the Philippines, c) craft a space within global theoretical discourse for our collective contributions, and d) contemplate on the trajectories, promises, and limitations, as well as set an agenda for the future. We endeavor to achieve these goals by preparing a collection of selected papers from the workshop in the form of either an edited volume in a reputable international university press or a special issue in a high-impact journal. Ultimately, we hope to see the growth of a vibrant body of scholarly and public-facing work on the Philippines that examines the complex intersection between food and environment, draws from diverse disciplinary perspectives, and converses with and challenges dominant theories and concepts adopted from the centers of knowledge production.  

Our workshop will be framed around the following central questions: 

  1. What are the emergent issues that link food and environment in the Philippines and how do they layer with the archipelago’s historical and contemporary social, cultural, political, economic, and material realities? 
  2. What position do food/environmental issues currently occupy in academic and public discourse in the Philippines and Filipino/Filipinx life, and how do we explain that positionality? 
  3. What does our exploration of these issues contribute to our understanding of global issues relating to food and environment? What contributions is our scholarship uniquely positioned to offer? How are we uniquely positioned to reframe debates largely dominated by centers of knowledge production?
  4. How do we set the agenda for future food/environmental scholarship and practice in the Philippines? How can we work to bring current scholarship to the center of public agendas?