Long Live Jollibee! Long Live Pinoys!

 The Internet connection at the office has gone bananas earlier today, and since my job is online teaching, that means i just have to sit around at the office and waste my compensated free time. I borrowed an old Time magazine from a colleague and was surprised to see an article talking about Jollibee. And though the whole point of the article was not really about cuisine or culinary criticism, it was still a bit amusing to find out Americans actually think the food we would die for is a bit appalling. Quoting Mr. Stein:

Jollibee’s two most popular items are called the Yumburger and the Chickenjoy. The Yumburger has a weird, plasticky dollop of French dressing in the middle. The crisped-up French fries are dry inside and taste as if they weren’t just double fried but dunked in oil four or five times. The fried chicken is halfway decent, …..

As expected, this pronouncement stirred a lot of violent reactions (although there are also many good-natured, explanatory ones) from Filipino Bee lovers and that lead me to a research about what Americans really think of Jollibee. When the internet connection was finally okay, google lead me to the blog of a girl named Pamie, and her account of what she thinks is a horrible experience–eating at Jollibee.

She and her friends talked about eating Jollibee food as if they were the bugs Americans love to watch other Americans eat on Fear Factor. They were absolutely revolted with the Jolly Spaghetti which is precisely what I love the most in Jollibee! Quoting again….

stee didn’t seem to hear me, because he was staring at the spaghetti. “Don’t eat that. Oh, look at that! Dude. There’s hot dogs in your spaghetti. And cheddar cheese. And chunks of… what is that?”

I felt my stomach wiggle, just a little. “Ham.”

“Ham!”

Reading the comments from readers of this Pamie girl’s blog I found out many Americans think having hotdogs and cheese on your spaghetti is about the most disgusting thing in the world.The same goes for sweet spaghetti. And I was like, everybody’s got hotdogs on their spaghetti! And if I had been a good girl all day long while my aunts are fussing about the food for Noche Buena, I even get the chance to grate the cheese on top! My sentiments could only be expressed through redundant statements and all caps:EVERY BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION IN THE PHILIPPINES HAS GOT TO HAVE SPAGHETTI AND SPAGHETTI HAS GOT TO HAVE HOTDOGS AND CHEESE! And Jollibee Spaghetti is the only fastfood spaghetti I would ever eat! I have yet to find a Filipino who preferred other fastfood spaghetti over Jollibee!

It’s quite unfair to say the Filipinos have bastardized the dish. We were merely adapting. We have an awful lot of bananas and that lead to the creation of the banana catsup, which the fIipino spaghetti owe its sweetness. We put hotdogs in them because they’re cheap and we are a developing country. Know how leche flan was invented? Ages ago eggwhite was used as an ingredient in the plaster used for churches, and filipino women just though of something to do with all the yolks. So I guess we have to be congratulated for our ingenuity. With the skyrocketing prices of pork and beef, who could afford meatballs? The blood-read hotdogs fill in the need just nicely.

This is what she had to say about Chickenjoy:

It was quite some time before anybody had a first bite. The only thing that looked like something we’d normally eat was the fried chicken, but once I pulled into it I saw that the meat was a pale brown, kind of tan color, and inside of the tan were the scary streaks of purple you never want to see in a meat that can make you quite ill when even your talented mom cooks it slightly incorrectly.

I don’t know what color  fried chicken should be to americans, but the tan shade she described—and what we all call as golden brown–is exactly how Jollibee Chicken Joy has looked like since I was a kid and KFC Chicken, in the Philippines at least, don’t look any different. I think Mcdonald’s’ chicken is a lit bit browner, which kinda gives me the impression that it’s burnt, and I have many friends who share the same opinion.  Being a bonafide Jollibee kid turned Jollibee crew in my teens, there’s also an explanation for the purple streaks that horrified this poor american gal. And, well, they’re not actually purple. They’re just dark brown areas on the inside of the chicken, and that’s just how they are, because they’re relatively young native chicken.

Well, it’s kinda funny.  I understand the thing about the Yumburger.  I have eaten and seen what they would probably call “real” burgers and the filipino version is quite different.  The Palabok Fiesta probably looks very alien to them, but so did mashed potato and coleslaw to a seven-year old me eating it for the first time at KFC, which by the way, was more popularly called Kentucky’s in the early nineties. Mind you, I don’t remember wincing and sniffing and acting as if I was being asked to eat night crawlers. Well, one of my Lolo’s deeply ingrained lessons was “Kung ano ang nasa mesa, yun and kainin.”  Translation: “Whatever’s on the table, eat it.”  Because, “Maraming tao sa mundo ang nagugutom.” Translation: “Many people in the world are starving.”

Which only goes to show the big difference between American and Filipino attitude toward food. Being an average Filipino, I think I speak of the majority when I say that when we come across food that doesn’t look like anything we would normally eat, we would politely take a bite and hide our disgust as much as possible. We would go and rant and laugh about it after were out of the restaurant or out of earshot of the person who prepared the food. I have read so many books and novels wherein a certain character would take two or three bites, and after being disappointed by the taste, would push their food away. Filipinos would offer the food to everybody on the table, not because they don’t want it, but because somebody else might be able to appreciate it. In that way the food is not wasted. And then, whatever’s left on the table, Filipinos would ask waiters to wrap it up so they could take it home and reheat it, or give it to someone else at home, or give it to the dog. So what upset me the most about Pamie’s story is that she and her friends have thrown away food they barely touched just because they were different from what they’re used to.

I think Filipinos are the most resilient people in the world. That’s why they’re everywhere. I remember my aunt tell the tale of her first few days in Bahrain. SHe said it was a bit of a nasty shock to have to see Arab people everywhere you look. But you have to learn to live with it. To eat foreign food, mingle with foreign people, and be introduced to a different culture. Filipinos do that very well. I guess its because of the value of Pakikisama. I don’t know how to properly translate that word in English, but Pagsama means Joining so pakikisama might translate as politely joining. We can adapt easily to any environment because we are not afraid of change.

So I say, Long Live Jollibee! Long Live Pinoys!