The theme explores food culture emanating from and contributing to the shaping of historical and cultural relations between the Philippines and Latin America from earliest to contemporary times. Food culture is generally defined in the literature as practices, beliefs, and traditions in the capture or access, production, distribution, and consumption of food. The theme looks into more than two centuries of commercial exchange through the galleon trade and later engagements, and how two distinctive worlds of food cultures came into contact, resulting in adaptations of natural material from both sides, fusions in culinary creations, and mutual acquisitions of consumption habits.
But food, seen as shaping identities and social belonging, as in the food preferences of a particular ethnic group, may also reveal how it serves to connect or bind peoples in new networks or identities. In the context of this trans-Pacific engagement, one could perhaps see moments or spaces for interaction of the peoples from both sides--on board the galleons, in ports of call, or in adapted villages, forging new networks or identities, or simply understanding, such as in a creole cuisine or in a Filipino coconut drink becoming an identity marker for an emergent new network or community.
Food culture also speaks of a food infrastructure—the particular set of knowledge, processes, skills, and rituals upon which the capture, production, preparation, distribution, and consumption of food are based and realized. It may also include how such knowledge and techniques are transmitted, such as in the form of recipes, culinary and dietary practices, and eating rituals in written or oral forms in homes or communities. Such infrastructure or any of its parts carry cultural meanings for a community. It would thus be interesting to see how much of any infrastructure is transmitted, and meanings acquired or modified, as practices are assimilated in the trans-Pacific exchange between peoples of both sides. Speaking of meanings, one may look into the language, including its translations, in the exchange.
Food culture, as it involves food systems (capture, production, distribution, consumption), encompasses not only culture, but also economy and politics. For every food phenomenon, one may see not only a cultural act, and attendant meanings, but also specific economic relations and political decisions. One may thus look at how food in the days of the galleon trade, or in contemporary times, may have been acquired, such as in the haciendas, and what social relations governed its capture. One may inquire into public policies, laws or decrees that facilitated particular aspects of food systems and processes, and what impact it caused administrators or producers and consumers, such as in the Basi (sugarcane wine) revolts in the early 19th century in northern Philippines, or similar cases in Latin America.
On a broader scale, particularly in the contexts of the trans-Pacific trade or present-day international relations, one may also inquire into issues of power and inequality, empire and globalization, discourse and representation. One may look at food as a commodity, an item in the market, being a decisive factor in the trans-Pacific trade and carrying a specific type of relations between two economic entities, the controlling empire and the participating colonial subjects and associated actors. In current international economic arrangements, one may look at food as an element either in shaping cultural relations or contributing to climate change impacts. Whichever aspect of global relations, one may see economic or political discourse and representations being defined by the dominant forces and influencing the direction of exchange, such as product preferences or consumer tastes, or developing fraternal relations on the ground among ordinary peoples from both sides articulated as shared culture.
The theme of food culture thus inquires not only on individual and communal acts in the production and consumption of food, taking on cuisines and rituals in their divergences and fusions between Filipinos and Latin Americans, but also the wider world of politics and economics, anthropology, sociology and ecology, its vast social impact in real life, including the philosophical and ethical questions underpinning every food phenomenon in this trans-Pacific exchange in historical and contemporary times.