Food tourism

Clang Garcia was in the inflight magazine trade for many years and would also dabble in handling inbound tours. She traveled as part of her job covering places for the magazine, and would see “hop-on hop-off” tours in major cities. These buses have designated stops on a route where a tourist can get on or off at any of the stops. Usually like a circuit, one can go around a circuit more than once if you wished. Taking inspiration from those tours, Clang tried to talk to hotels in Manila to pilot a similar tour but this time, using the popular iconic Filipino jeepney. The hotels could not grasp the concept of making people get on at their stop but lose them to other destinations. Clang had to innovate to keep her business going, and so she curated tours around food.

Along with the late chef Margarita Forés and with the late tourism secretary Mon Jimenez, she curated a tour for food media for the Madrid Fusion in 2017. They started the trip at Farmer’s Market in Cubao, visited historical sites in Intramuros, stopped at designated restaurants to try local fare – and slowly the tour was taking shape. Since then, Clang has focused on food tours instead of the usual tourist sites with obscure dining experiences. Most tours would bring tourists to iconic sites but would serve food just as a break with no mention of its origins and local ingredients. Clang’s innovation led to the publication of her first book “Food Holidays” in 2016, which won the Best Food Tourism book at the Gourmand awards in 2021.

The jeepney was another concern. She had to get a franchise from the Land Transportation Franchise Regulatory Board even if she only had one jeepney. She has special routes, not competing with the riding public on regular jeepneys. When she was about to renew her franchise, the agency shifted or updated its requirements, asking her to buy 10 new jeepneys with Euro4 compliance. First, it was going to cost her a lot. Second, how could she operate 10 new tours by herself? Her prayers were answered because the COVID lockdowns happened even before she could take a loan to get those new vehicles which would have drained her cash flow. A sigh of relief for Clang to again twist and pivot to another business model.

She went around the country to discover unusual food that was indigenous to a community and got to meet many cultural communities which now became her signature food tours. I am a witness to her success as she took three foreigner friends of mine on a special tour of Manila with food included. The focus is on food and its origins, with the side tour of the sights. This makes her tours unique and truly an experience tourists can keep as a beautiful memory of the Philippines.

In the Slow Food movement (www.slowfood.com) we do have Slow Food travel which began in Europe and now is already in Western Visayas. The Slow Food focus is on preservation of culture through food and traditional ways of cooking. Think pinikpikan manok, pinaupong manok, pinausukan manok which are ways different provinces and cultures prepare chicken. Even paksiw (stewed in vinegar) for fish is called differently in Iloilo as pinamalhan. There are slight variations in souring ingredients or in fermentation called buro, balao-balao or in pickling like atchara.

This is also how Clang envisions the preservation of culture, starting with the basic social unit which is the family. If we eat together as a family even just once a month, and feature Lola’s recipes or taste what our mothers used to cook, we can start listing down these recipes and passing them down to the next generation. Her advice to all readers and their families is to preserve their own family recipes because eating together makes a family unite in a soulful way. We are the guardians of our culture and if we look inwards, we can touch three generations immediately and preserve what we still remember.

My brother took it upon himself to gather everyone every Sunday lunch to rediscover recipes of our Mom’s puchero, pancit lomi and even how she served seafood like crablets, crabs and shrimps. Everybody gets to learn how to eat talangka, buntot sa mustasa, giniling sa tausi and tito sa mani. Every family has their quirky traditions and this, according to Clang’s research, is our food heritage.

To innovate on her jeepney tours, Clang helped develop the Malabon tricycle food tours, food tours in Binondo, Intramuros and Cavite and a special indigenous foodways tour combining B’laan and T’boli cultures in Sarangani and Cotabato. There, tourists see how indigenous people start fire from scratch and use what is in their backyard, or what you can call a “zero kilometer” dish as you never have to leave home to get ingredients. That is true locavorism, or cooking from what is closest to point of use – the backyard reveals all the ingredients for a local dish.

Her good and green tips for sustainability of food cultures are to travel, eat and learn. And we can start today with our own families. What did your grandmother (in our case, our grandfather cooked) cook? Since our great grandparents came from Amoy (now Xiamen), our grandfather taught our mother that kind of cooking which we still do today, four generations later. After keeping your family recipes intact, you can now travel and learn other cultures, locally first like Pampango or Visayan cuisine, or even Tausug fare.

Or you can join Clang on one of her tours and learn more about foodways and our Filipino food culture. You can find Clang in social media and as Food Ambassador of the World Food travel association. Or get a copy of her book Food Holidays, a do-it-yourself food guide to Philippine gastronomy.