Doreen G. Fernandez & Edilberto N. Alegre

Edilberto N. Alegre writes: “In our first encounter with Magellan on March 16, 1521, the Samareños gave him two kinds of bananas, two coconuts, fish and a jar of palm wine. The last two were surely meant for inuman—fish for pulutan and the palm wine as inumin. Twelve days later the king of Limasawa (an island off southern Leyte) invited the Spaniards to a banquet that started with inuman: this time the pulutan was pork. And how did we make the ceremonial toast? ‘They raise their hands to heaven first, then take the drinking vessel in their right hand and extend the first of their left hand toward the company,’ reports Pigafetta. In Cebu they were treated to turtle eggs with the wine.”^[1] Yet, Alegre goes on in his book, Inumang Pinoy, not to view drinking from foreign eyes, but to put it in the context of our cultures: to understand drinking and its rituals from within, as a cultural act. Indeed, Alegre stated that “the question that must be addressed to our cuisine is—what does the narrative of our food tell us about our culture?”^[2]

Edilberto N. Alegre and Doreen G. Fernandez—the iconic and recurring pair of co-authors, colleagues, and scholars-in-arms—had that in common: an eye for the vernacular and, as a result, for processes of indigenization and syncretism, whether historical, contemporary, or timeless in some gustatory sense. Alegre called Fernandez his “indefatigable editor, dear friend, and comrade of many battles.”^[3]

Fernandez’s multidisciplinary scholarship included research on the indigenization of the Spanish musical theater form of the zarzuela into the sarswela, including its many conventions such as the history of the background scene paintings, costume, norms of physical intimacy on stage, and the sarswela’s competition with the komedya and later with movies.^[4] From her early research on the sarswela, Fernandez went on to study the long history of Philippine drama and theater, whether Jesuit-led or in protest of the Marcos dictatorship; she also researched mass cultures across the islands and their ecosystems within the press system and media, as well as their treatment of women; and literature, including literary oral history and Hiligaynon poetry. But, above all, we remember Fernandez for food. She clarified Filipino food—the place of food in our cultures, and the place of our cultures in our foods. Yet the scholar Adrian de Leon argues that Fernandez’s earlier scholarship anticipates the later research on Philippine food that has made Fernandez iconic, because of the continuous thread through her work on the vernacular and on everyday, lived cultures. “The reach of Fernandez’s work is not only in how she imagined a national culinary culture, but in the focus on the everyday people who made that food in the face of economic precarity and food scarcity under a brutal dictatorship.”^[5] This was the “crisis-ethos” of Philippine cuisine that Fernandez described, in which creativity joined necessity, economy, and a principle of zero waste. 

Aileen Suzara, a Filipino American chef, described finding in Fernandez’s work the “most intimate link to place, memory, and language. [Food] is a visceral archive of survival,” and Fernandez’s works such as Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture republished by international academic publisher Brill in 2019, offered readers the “luminous possibilities of a living culture.”^[6] Thankfully Tikim remains in print, but the puzzle has long been how Fernandez’s body of food writing can be so seminal and yet, at the same time, so difficult to find. “Among scholarly, culinary, and other circles of Doreen Fernandez enthusiasts,” historian Adrian de Leon recounts, we would pass her texts “via personal networks (and balikbayan boxes) across the Pacific, or through interlibrary loans, or through more illicit digital means.”^[7] The scholar Catherine Ceniza Choy reflected on the impossible fact that most of Fernandez’s works were out of print: “I was overcome with anxiety and grief. How could this be? What would it mean for current and future generations of Filipinos, for food lovers everywhere, for all students of history and culture? I felt a deep sense of loss.”^[8] Exploding Galaxies is thrilled to restore onto shelves the two most important works on Philippine food history, Sarap and Palayok, breathing new life into the works and ensuring their insights remain accessible.

De Leon argues that Fernandez and Alegre’s seminal work, Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food, initially published in 1988 and republished in its important new Exploding Galaxies 2025 edition alongside Fernandez’s iconic work, Palayok, embeds an anti–Cold War and anti-imperial critique within its essays. It is a critique that one can trace growing along Fernandez’s writing. “In particular, by focusing on how she conceptualized the Filipino body, from the probinsya (provinces) to the kalye (urban streets), and from artistic performance to the work of cooking and eating, Fernandez articulated a covert critique of Cold War–era technocracy.” More specifically, de Leon argued, “In the face of abstractions of international development and authoritarianism, she pulled the center of the Philippine geobody away from figures of upper-class masculine leadership, centering instead the embodied labors and sensoria of the urban poor, the non-Tagalog rural masses, Indigenous people, working-class women, and the flora and fauna of an abundant archipelago.”^[9] Alegre and Fernandez’s hallmark interdisciplinarity shines on every page of Sarap as well as on every page of Fernandez’s Palayok, drawing from political ecology, history, literary textual analysis, and performance studies to bring precision and insight to Philippine food cultures.

A scholar of Philippine culture, literature, drama and theater, and culinary traditions, Fernandez was born in Manila in 1934, but grew up in her native Silay in Negros Occidental, which shaped her rural and regional sensibilities. She earned a BA in English and History at St. Scholastica’s College in 1954 and an MA and PhD in Literature at the Ateneo de Manila University, with the poet Bienvenido Lumbera as her advisor. She married the interior architect Wili Fernandez, and it was when she and Wili were invited to co-write a newspaper column in 1968 on food that Doreen Fernandez’s thirty-four-year career as a food writer began. With sparkling, limpid prose, Fernandez is remembered as an inimitable writer, but those who worked with her remember her still more fondly as a teacher. She was also an activist within the establishment, even as she headed off criticism that she was concerned with supposedly bourgeois topics. She did not join the anti-Marcos underground, but she was their known ally within the classroom, instilling critical thinking in her students, founding the theater group Babaylan that staged plays critical of the dictatorship, and developing the long-running if submerged political arguments of her food writing, which carefully slipped past censors while remaining in plain sight. She also aided the revolutionary movement outside the classroom, taking on the “special tasks”^[10] for the resistance and housing comrades resisting repression, cleaning their bullet wounds and providing safe harbor.^[11] Fernandez was not the only food writer to emerge on the scene in her day, in fact she and Alegre are part of a rich food studies movement that came of age in the 1970s. But, De Leon notes that what set Fernandez apart was “her turn away from mere consumption toward the embodied aspects of food, from preparation to eating, within a matrix of Indigenous knowledges formed through the senses.” And that, moreover, “her writings on rural food, especially from her home island of Negros, enable[d] her to chart a gastropolitics of the Philippines that locates the culinary labors of non-elite, non-urban women at the center of nation making.”^[12]

Edilberto N. Alegre was born in Naujan, Mindoro, but was raised in Victoria, Tarlac. His childhood neighborhood in Tarlac was filled with a mix of Ilocano, Tagalog, and Kapampangan settlers, and perhaps as a result he was a poet, writer, scholar, and a close observer of how language and literature shape popular culture. He earned a BS in General Science and a BA and MA in English from the University of the Philippines and a PhD in Japanese Language and Literature from Kyoto University. He published on the writings of Junichiro Tanizaki and the world of Japanese literature after the second opening of the country to Western influence. Alegre taught at the University of the Philippines and Ateneo de Manila University, and was an English teacher in Madrid, Spain, for four years.^[13] He wrote columns for the Sunday Inquirer Magazine and BusinessWorld sharing his extensive cultural research undertaken all over the country. He published three books, Inumang Pinoy, Pinoy Forever: Essays on Culture and Language, and Pinoy na Pinoy: Essays on National Culture, while a fourth, Biyaheng Pinoy: A Mindanao Travelogue, was published posthumously. Alegre was a formidable literary and cultural critic.^[14] He also developed a theory of indigenization based on his linguistic study of Filipino, and formulated a decolonial approach to culture long before the emergence of our current decolonial movement, which continues to reform academia today.

Fernandez and Alegre first collaborated not on a food book, but on a two-volume oral history of Philippine writers in English, The Writer and His Milieu: An Oral History of First Generation Writers in English (1984) and Writers and Their Milieu: An Oral History of Second Generations Writers in English (1987). They went on to co-author Sarap (1988), and continued their collaboration with the Lasa series of dining guides (1989–1992) and Kinilaw: A Philippine Cuisine of Freshness (1991). 

Alegre wrote, “It must always be remembered that the foreign came to be an organic part of the local—what took place was indigenization or Filipinization. It was not a case of the local becoming foreign, which would be Americanization. We were neither Hispanized nor Americanized. We retained who and what we were prior to the coming of the Spaniards and the Americans to our archipelago.”^[15] This is an insight that José Rizal himself had voiced in La Solidaridad, discussing the Filipinos’ ability to absorb and use others’ cultures within the local ones as an evolutionary advantage that other races supposedly did not possess in the same store. “We gobbled up the cultures of the Spaniards and the Americans. And we have emerged stronger and healthier for it,” Alegre explained, echoing Rizal. “We have a vital national culture that is unafraid of engaging modern technological revolutions. Global culture? Yes. We survived the nearly 400 years of Spanish and American presence here. We came through intact and vital. And that—not only to survive but to prevail—is the essence of our being Pinoy.”^[16]

That Fernandez and Alegre’s manifold insights survived the travails of the Philippine publishing industry is no small feat and yet also no surprise. Exploding Galaxies’ reissued editions of the seminal works Sarap and Palayok, newly reimagined through fresh photography and artwork, seek to maintain Fernandez and Alegre’s work as accessible for generations to follow.

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^{[1] Edilberto N. Alegre, Inumang Pinoy (Pasig: Anvil, 1992), 12.}

^{[2] Edilberto N. Alegre, “Food in time, foodand time: the contour of our pleasure,” Pinoy na Pinoy, BusinessWorld, 19August 2003.}

^{[3] Edilberto N. Alegre, Pinoy Na Pinoy!: Essays on National Culture (Pasig: Anvil, 1994), 293.}

^{[4] See: Doreen G. Fernandez, “Zarzuela to Sarswela: Indigenization and Transformation,” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 41, no. 3 (1993): 320–343.}

^{[5] Adrian de Leon, “A Visceral Archive of Survival: Doreen Fernandez’s Sarap and the ‘Crisis-Ethos’ of Philippine Cuisine,” Eating More Asian America (New York University Press), 370.}

^{[6] Quoted in de Leon, “A Visceral Archive of Survival,” 370}

^{[7] De Leon, “A Visceral Archive of Survival,” 370.}

^{[8] Quoted in de Leon, “A Visceral Archive of Survival,” 370–371.}

^{[9] De Leon, “A Visceral Archive of Survival,” 371.}

^{[10] Jose Maria Sison Legacy Foundation, “Tribute to Doreen Gamboa Fernandez,” 7 July 2002.}

^{[11] Teddy Casino, “Doreen, the Revolutionary,” 84–86, in “Tributes to Doreen Fernandez,” Kritika Kultura 2 (2002): 83–126, 85–86.}

^{[12] De Leon, “A Visceral Archive of Survival,” 373.}

^{[13] Malou L. Maniquis and Rosalinda Galang, “Alegre, Edilberto N,” CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art Digital Edition, https://epa.culturalcenter.gov.ph/9/80/5025/. Accessed 22 July 2025.}

^{[14] See: Edilberto N. Alegre, “Language and Power,” Philippine Studies 32, no. 3 (Third Quarter 1984): 344–350.}

^{[15] Edilberto N. Alegre, “Everyday Casually,” Pinoy na Pinoy, BusinessWorld, 29 April 2008.}

^{[16] Alegre, “Everyday Casually.”}