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Way back in the late nineties, in Cabayugan. A tribal community in the Palawan, the Philippines.

A small group of Japanese on a sponsored program looking at ways the community could offer their traditional culture to visitors.

The Philippines is not famous for its food. To make matters worse, the island had just been hit bit a dreadful typhoon, two days before we arrived.

Many local crops were wiped out, so food was on everyone's minds.

Gourmet meal

This is what we eventually managed to produce on the table - all from locally-available ingredients.

The oceanic fish I must admit are dependent on local fishermen with reasonably sized boats that regularly arrive at the port of Sabang

Feast-Tagbanua-style

I am not sure if this is the traditional way of "feasting", but it was certainly the way the people would eat in a group when the got together when we were there.

Most live a semi-subsistence lifestyle: they buy nice things when they have money, but live of the land when they don't (which is most of the time)

Fish and meat, when available are the favorites with the mountains of rice. When they are not, substitutes have to be found.

Famine food

This is where it started. Tomas here is eating rattan shoots. He told me this is what he is forced top eat when the sea is too rough to catch fish.

At first he didn't think of offering us any simply because he didn't think we would stoop to eat this sort thing.

I asked the cook to see what he could do with this sort of stuff, as we too were having difficulty supplying ourselves from town..

Armando

This is Armando, our cook at the time. He too had been doing his best to cater for us by bringing what he thought was food fit for foreigners: Canned food, imported vegetables, etc. All very expensive and difficult to procure as we were a long way for town.

Starting with the rattan, he eventually he got the idea and started asking around for local ingredients and how they were used.

It's all in the presentation.

Some examples of what Armando produced from local ingredients. Much of it is not that different to what the group in the earlier picture were eating off the table, but the presentation made all the difference.

One of the most helpful ingredients was the indigenous citrus (lower left).

Palm heart

This is a kind of palm. It's main value is in wood for flooring, but the core of the trunk is soft and has a delicious texture. It was my personal favorite.

Unfortunately, you have to cut down the palm tree, and we removed it from our menu for this reason.

Fish and meaty foods such as this freshwater were no problem. But interestingly, many of the local people were extremely shy about forest plants.

Apparently they not the sort of food to offer to a visitor, and is more associated with hard times when no other food is available.

Often the would not sell to us directly, but would often pass them through a third person.

Gourmet

This table event was more for a photographer who was present. just to show what can be done with "jungle food" even in the Philippines.

The gourmet platter shown earlier appeared here