-----Ludwig Feerbach
I'm no Adonis or Fabio and my resume for passion certainly neither reads Eros nor Cupid(for the Romans)but one of my few remaining passions that can never be faulted is my passion for food. This poor lover makes up for it by being THE FOOD LOVER. I love to eat and in keeping with my reputation as not a connoisseur definitely, far from it, but a food authority, I've gone through different restos all over Metro to keep me updated with its tastes and flavors. Think Anthony Bourdain of Discovery travel and living minus the exotic food and on a smaller scale.....ahhhh....junk the Anthony Bourdain, he's in a different league but that dude's job surely is cool: Eat and travel, eat and travel, and never go fat!
Growing up, the money I spent for just about everything came from the meager allowance I got from my parents. I kept a bank account where I could see the littlest peso I saved out of my littlest allowance grow into something I could use in times of contingency. The bank teller never flipped through so much my passbook cause the entries never exceeded 2 pages over its entire financial lifetime. Needless to say, I didnt have enough money. Food out of the ordinary was a luxury to me. While my well to do classmates ate burgers for recess, I ate junk food. While a complete meal at Aling Zeny's meant sparing yourself from having to queue for a vegetable viand and rice, I would queue for that vegetable viand and rice. I learned how to budget at an early age partly to save but largely to see miss sexy teller more than just once every two months and with a little swagger warranted by a generous, as per my standard, 200 peso deposit.
Having just enough money to spend for the whole day at school, my earliest food trips were kinda scaled down to eating street food. I had to cut corners on the choice of food during breaks so as to afford the food trips after school. Fishballs, scrambles, poor man's snowcones, sago, gulaman, et.al. I've come across all these staples one time or another. But the one street food which merited all the starving-myself-saving fuss was what my highschool buddies and I had come to call as Bugoy. Boiled egg dipped in artificially colored orange flour and fried after, Bugoy, for a while, had its run as the object of our cheap palate's cravings. But Bugoy is actually a misnomer. Actually I forgot what it's really called but I am certain we got it all wrong when we called it Bugoy. Tokneneng, cooked and prepared similarly to, ok I will call it Bugoy for the meantime, Bugoy(there) uses quail eggs as opposed to chicken or duck eggs for Bugoys. At that time a bugoy would set you back by 2.75 Pesos. The jeep fare then was 1.50 Pesos. While it was still a cheap fare(the bugoy not the jeep fare), the price of one bugoy was almost your jeep fare to and fro school. Compare that to today's bugoy sold for 7 pesos and the jeep fare of 8 pesos(just one way) and you practically get a clear picture of how much the price of fuel has obscenely stratosphered to. The same mechanics apply in eating bugoy then as it is now: get yourself a plastic bowl, place your bugoy, pour some vinegar, add some rock salt and eat like the hepatitis seeking cheapskate that you are. I would gobble 3 bugoys in one sitting. I was young, my body could cushion all the saturated fats, cholesterol, sodium and watching over my health was the least of my concerns. Now, I can't imagine myself indulging into bugoys. My blood pressure level needs utmost pampering and I'm better off munching frozen vegetable stalks if I know what's good for me.
College didn't offer much budget buffering as I would have thought. My allowance simply increased in proportion with the transportation fare but the money I spent for food was just proportionate with the inflation rate. There wasn't any special math put into it. Overall, I was still in the same position as I was in highschool in other words, if I wanted anything more "foodwise" than just getting me through the day as my ample budget would allow, I would have to scrimp a little on lunch, or maybe a snack so I could afford an indulgent food trip. Overtime I learned how to stretch my budget. There are gems to be found on cheap food stalls and satiating the palate doesn't have to mean getting away from paying the bus fare(I don't do that!).
Inside the campus there was the humble kiosk where eating was SRO(standing room only). There was no dining table. You put your plate on the cement protrusion along the perimeter of the kiosk. Their specialty: palabok. The famed palabok's sauce was thick in consistency and it was a food coloring's haven. I may have scrimped on my budget but the chef sure didn't scrimp on throwing in a month's supply of food color to his special sauce. Despite that, palabok matched with caramel oozing turon was a surefire hit. For drinks, one had a wide array of coca-cola products on a vending machine to choose from. But the best drink was Hi-C washing over honeybees while being vended(?). I didn't know where the honeybees came from, there was no floral garden in sight but it made the drink perhaps tastier. Nobody was complaining cause the kiosktender was one touchy old lady and her explanation that the bees were clean delivered in an angry tone suppressed further attempts at complaining.
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