Filipinos are fun of eating delicious yet affordable foods like the street food. These are foods displayed beside the streets literally and are usually fried or grilled. The country’s cuisine has been shaped by a number of factors, such as diverse foreign influences from the Malays and the Spanish to the Americans and the Chinese, as well as the varied cultures, traditions, and socio-economic circumstances in every region. But while a lot of inspiration comes from their colonizers, occupiers and immigrants, Pinoys are ingenious cooks who have created—and continue to create—fresh, flavorful dishes out of borrowed recipes, each with an undeniable Filipino twist that may be attributed to indigenous cooking techniques, homegrown ingredients, or family kitchen secrets.
Street foods are usually dipped to vinegar with spices or to ketchup or it can be a combination of both. Chicken or pork Barbecue is one of those foods that are found most commonly along the street also with “Kwek-kwek” and “Balut”. These foods are certainly very delicious talking about their taste but when we talk about their cleanliness, we can never be sure about it. It is also based on the people who prepared them and saying that all of them are harmful to the people and can cause sickness is definitely unfair.
You can’t really please everybody and there are some who really can’t appreciate the taste and appearance of our foods specially those tourists and foreigners. Some also have seen and even felt the bad side of eating these foods because of an alleged experience of stomachache, diarrhea and many more. These incidents are very unfortunate since not really all foods and vendors would show and make them feel the disgust and dirtiness they’ve experienced from others.
As buyer and eater, one should consider not just the craving or the curiosity of how a certain food tastes but also how clean it is. They should also avoid stereotyping Filipino foods because of what they’ve seen or how they tasted them because these foods not only from the Philippines but also from other countries are just prepared by people and not all people are the same.
Filipinos may have different perspectives about their nation’s cuisine, but many share a strong sense of pride in it. Also, foreigners have their own opinions whether good or bad about our nation’s cuisine but beyond that, we can only truly understand and appreciate Filipino food with our taste buds.