Odong

 

Our buds were tamed at that time. Within the stretch of five months, we were served with similar dishes throughout the duration of the seminar. Those dishes were widely popular among local executive hotels, and the pride offerings of well-informed restaurateurs in the city. From breakfasts, lunches and suppers, we were served with the same dishes prepared by their in-house chef. I was with a developmental works among our banana farmers during those days. I was designated as documentation staff for all those equipping and retooling exercise among our farmers. Our group rhetorically termed those efforts as capability building for our grassroot banana farmers. Such advocacy and extension works were already applied and tested in Latin American countries were banana farming was also prevalent.

 My boss never complained for the first three weeks of continuous serving of the same dishes. Our capability building seminar lasted Five months among the eight hundred lowland banana farmers. We split them into numerous manageable batches until the last week of the Fifth month. We hooked up with a garden resort as our training venue, located just below the place of another non government organization (NGO) with an advocacy on the preservation of wild life habitat at the foothills of Mt. Apo, particularly on propagating by artificial incubation our endangered bird species, the Philippine Monkey-eating Eagle.

 Until our taste buds were blunted with the familiarity of the foods that were served to us within three straight weeks, and my boss finally resolved to ask for a relief. We then pleaded with the venue staffs for a change of the foods to be served for us, members of the training staffs. We even asked the management if they could serve us with the ordinary Odong and Tinapa just to give our taste buds a break from their entire world class menu. Unfortunately, our venue host graciously declined our request. We could not budge them to serve us with such too trivial dish, too simple, too ignoble to be included among their long list of world class menu.

 Perhaps Odong and Tinapa (O&T) is the only dish one could never find in any menu in several food courts, because it is not worth offering or even appealing for their highly sophisticated, urban-finesse guests and customers. O&T is just a home dish, prepared only when “nothing else” can be cooked and served for a meal. O&T is not worth displaying, not even worth tasting for some cultured Pinoys. Maybe our host’s chef considered our ridiculous request as an affront to his earned degree in acclaimed culinary school, or they misunderstood it as degradation for such a highly esteemed profession. They were not trained in culinary schools, and went into on the job training (OJT) with famous executive hotels only to be asked to prepare such an underrated dish.

 Back to our venue host, they partially heed to our request for a temporary relief by adding a dose of fried dried fish and Pinakbet in lieu of our requested ordinary O&T, and such a dish at that particular time, just reminded us that the simple, the common, the unsophisticated is still the best. It was as if, we revolted against the conventional preference of the classy gastronomic world, when we craved then for that old time best dish of Odong and Tinapa, or they just simply ignored us and prejudicially branding us then as tagabukid, whose minds were still undernourished by such simple Odong and Tinapa. And I just mused over our natural simplicity then.