Friday, April 04, 2008 Malilong: Elevating the status of camote By Frank Malilong The Other Side
SO Bohol farmers eat camote? Big deal.
One of the more successful Boholanos in Cebu City, Councilor Edgar Labella, eats camote every day and he isn’t complaining. Edgar runs at the Cebu City Sports Center oval for at least an hour four to five days a week while his rice-eating colleagues in the Walk Talk and Eat Club like Raffy Chan and USC Law Dean Alex Monteclar can only walk.
As a certified camote eater myself, I take strong exception to the implied slur on the sweet tuber by an official of a farmers’ support group who claimed that because of the lack of government support, Bohol rice farmers are forced to eat camote.
In my younger days, we cultivated camote in Masbate. Unlike corn or rice, the root crop is resistant to typhoon, which was a common occurrence, so for most parts of the year, we had boiled or broiled camote, sinaksak, iraid and binignit for breakfast, lunch and dinner (snacks were unheard of during our time).
The harvest was usually plentiful and we saved the extra produce for the rainy days by stocking them in the sibay and watering them every day until they grew shoots and vines. Sometimes, we would trade our camote for fish but mostly the menu was camote with utan agbati and kamunggay.
My mother who ate camote all her life lived to be 86; some of our neighbors even longer. I’d like to think that their diet had something to do with that.
But while I am not too sure about the direct connection between camote eating and longevity, I am certain of some of its other salutary properties. For example, for those who are bowel movement challenged, it makes it easier to shout “Success!” at the end of the trip to the restroom.
Also, for those afflicted by a severe modesty loss, I prescribe a regular dose of camote three times a day. I recommend this to politicians especially. My theory is that camote will re-channel the wind that you have over-accumulated in your head so that instead of spewing out of your mouth, it passes through a generally harmless exit. One word of caution though: when passing air this way, stay out of crowded areas.
So please don’t insult the camote by saying we are forced to eat it because nothing else is available. We have been so dependent on rice and look where that has brought us. If we only had cultivated our taste for camote, we wouldn’t have been as alarmed as we are now over the dwindling supply and the spiraling cost of rice.
Even the bishops are saying that we should eat camote instead of rice. We do not have to wait for divine intervention in order to elevate the status of camote in the dining table, do we?
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What is a rational gentleman like Luis Villafuerte doing in the Basketball Association of the Philippines (BAP)? The BAP has been marginalized if not rendered irrelevant by the creation of the BAP-Samahang Basketbol ng Pilipinas (SBP) and I can’t figure out how a seasoned politician like the Bicol congressman could have allowed himself to be sucked into the fray.
Some old fogies in amateur basketball obviously can’t accept the reality that they have lost whatever clout they had and are using Villafuerte as front liner in their campaign of vendetta. The ploy won’t work and sooner than later Villafuerte will realize that it is easier to unseat a House Speaker than to replace SBP’s timber with BAP’s deadwood.
