Street Foods of Love and Immunity

Growing up in the provinces of a third world country has its perks. We get to eat street food for snacks and our parents don't tell us off. They actually join in when the dirty ice cream peddler comes by our gate. (Dirty ice cream is a very cheap alternative ice cream that has no brand. It is not really dirty and in our society, it does not really connote that it is.) Since we only have two weathers in our country--hot and very hot--we love ice cream. And since we're not really in the wealthy economical sphere, we love cheap ice cream even more.

There are a lot of kinds of street foods that can even be found in front of schools. The school administration forbid the students to eat in those food stalls that are as prolific in the Philippines as hotdog stands are in the U.S. There are some that are generally clean due the food's processing and storage while others (most of the street foods) are unsanitary, but we love them nonetheless.

I always believed my older siblings when they comment on how dirty some of the snacks we eat are - the fishballs (meat balls made of finely pulverized fish meat, deep fried and served with sweet and sour and often times chili sauce) and que-que (deep fried quail eggs covered in flour, served with a sour sauce of vinegar, onions, garlic and pepper). My older brother and older sister are nurse and medical technologist respectively. They often describe the common bacteria found in these foods while we're enjoying our snacks. When their explanations are complete, they conclude with the joke, "That's why we have to eat more, in order to strengthen our immune systems in order to fight against these bacteria."

We have the knowledge, we know why they are dirty but we could not stay away from them. However, street foods still serve as the cheapest and most accessible snack places in the Philippines. And for a country that has 40% of its population below the poverty line - food is food or as we say, "lamang tiyan din yan" (that's still food for the stomach). We do what we can to enjoy life and to experience life - we take the difficult (the dirty) and we better ourselves from it.

It's a stupid joke but it bears a lot of sense in it. It does not only concern the food we eat but it is indirectly related to how we live life. Living in our society meant a lot to us, we were trained harder in life - we study hard because we know that other people have better schools, we work hard because we know that other people have different forms of unfair advantages against us, we experience what is difficult in order to rise higher.