Excellencies, Friends, Ladies and Gentlemen

It is my great honor and privilege to open another key event in the celebration of the 50 th
Anniversary of the establishment of Philippine-New Zealand Relations A Taste of
Home, a Celebration of Filipino Cuisine. Many international chefs and food critics have
heralded Filipino Cuisine as the next great thing with Anthony Bourdains and Andrew
Zimmermans exploration of the Philippine culinary scene and sampling of our dishes,
including the more exotic ones, for a global television and web audience. Manila is
compared favourably with the likes of Paris as a mecca for foodies for the sheer variety
and number of eateries. Dishes and desserts such as our Halo-Halo, shaved ice with a
rainbow variety of sweets, is all the rage now in New York.
Our foods, and stomachs, indeed reflect the tapestry of our nation, we are a MalayoPacific people, with Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern strains, spending - four
centuries in a Catholic Convent, four decades in Hollywood, and four years in the Ginza,
reflecting our Spanish, American and Japanese colonial eras. All this combined,
together with the rich variety of regional cuisines, yield a colourful and varied Filipino
foodie culture. A Filipino needs to eat rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner but the Kiwi
will see many familiar items in the Pinoys kitchen table. Our favoured breakfast is
practically identical to a full Kiwi Breakfast with eggs, fried meats like ham, bacon and
sausages, canned beans but with fried garlic rice. Our viands for lunch and dinner will
see our Chinese , Indo-Malay and Spanish influences with noodle and egg-roll type
dishes and meat and vegetable stews. Our snacks are quite similar to the sticky rice
and coconut goodies of our ASEAN brothers and sisters. Filipinos love Western
standards like Fried Chicken and Spaghetti, but with local twists in the recipe. One of
our more famous or infamous treats is something we share with Vietnam and is the
worlds best aphrodisiac duck eggs. But we have a few surprises of our own, including
a repertoire of dishes with colourful names like Chocolate Meat, Betamax, and IUDs
ask your Filipino friends what they are.
To introduce you to our food, we have friends from the Filipino Community and the
Embassy who have prepared a samplings of our many dishes, and we are honoured to
have with us the renown Kiwinoy Celebrity Chef Leo Fernandez, imported all the way
from Auckland, to demonstrate gourmet Filipino cusine. My thanks to Bulwagan
Foundation Trust for the initiative in organizing, the Taste of Home. And may you all
enjoy our cuisine, and to taste for yourself why it is chronically difficult for Filipinos to
stay slender.
Mabuhay !