Catherine Batac Walder’s writing has recently appeared in Demons of the New Year, Philippines Graphic, Ruin and Resolve Anthology, Eyeshot, and Expanded Horizons. She blogs at http://deckshoes.wordpress.com.

Street Food (May 20, 2010. Issue 17.)

I miss proper street food.

A few years ago, I shushed my student who said to his seatmate, “I ate dirty ice cream for lunch.” I was unaware that it was the common term for the kind of ice cream I grew up buying from Noel. Noel was our neighbor who didn’t shower and who had a Good Morning towel that hung from his back pocket. He used the towel to wipe the ice cream drippings off the metallic top of his ice cream cart. I used to chat with him whenever I bought from him and I’d sometimes catch him put one of his fingers into his ear in between customers. I’d tell him off, “Noel, don’t let customers see you do that, it will put them off.” “I’m just removing dry skin,” he said. But when he retrieved his finger I saw the nail caked with something yellow and unsightly and could easily pass to have been scooped from a tub. There were days when I suggested to Noel to sell taho (tofu pudding) instead. Taho is clean because if it is not, you will know, it will not solidify, and also, if you don’t consume it within a day, it will stink. Still I kept buying ice cream from Noel, hoping my everyday contribution to his sales would in some way help make ends meet for him. I asked for the ice cream in a cup because I felt disgusted whenever he touched the cones with his yellow fingernails and handed them over to the buyers. I haven’t seen him since we moved out of that neighborhood almost two decades ago and last I heard he went mad. I didn’t learn of the details, if his selling dirty ice cream was a direct cause of him going mad.

I moved to a new neighborhood where a single mother and her kids living at a house across the road always awakened me during midnight whenever they started dressing chickens. Each day when midnight struck, they dressed a minimum of 100 chickens. I thought that the chicken business was theirs, and my mother said they were paid to dress the chickens for a relative who sold them in the market. "Is Ato required to help?" I asked. Ato was about seven years old at that time. Fortunately, he was spared, leaving the job to his young mother, his brother and sister (both teenagers) and the twins (12-year-olds, one boy and one gay). "It’s one peso per chicken," Ma said. "What?" I asked, not understanding. "If they dress 160 for the night then they are paid one hundred sixty pesos," Ma said. That was around $3 for beheading, draining the blood in plates of rice grains (set aside for people who liked pies made of chicken blood), plucking the feathers, cutting around the anus, cleaning the insides of 100 chickens everyday from midnight to dawn. I almost wept. But at least the single mother and her kids could keep the chicken heads and adidas (feet, popular as snack among beer-drinkers) and intestines, wash the crap off them and sell. The neighbors would pay to eat grilled chicken heads and adidas and intestines.

I moved to the city to go to college where there was an art student in one of my classes whom I hated at first because he was so damn smart he would have one-on-one exchanges with the Humanities professor about books, films, music and the world while the rest of the class gaped in awe. They would laugh together, the rest of us unaware what they were laughing about, nevertheless we nervously joined in the laughter. The laugh subsided and we bowed our heads like schizos when the professor asked a question nobody except the art student knew the answer to. One time while waiting in line at an ATM machine, I saw that contrary to popular belief, the art student wasn’t a god, just some normal college boy who could eat a one-day-old chick battered in flour and artificial food coloring in bright orange. I saw him in front of the fishball and one-day-old chick seller’s cart. He turned away to face the wall but I saw him do it, eat the one-day-old chick in one go and I thought that he was a regular guy and I fell in love.

I moved abroad where street food as I know it is impossible to get. My choices to “go street” are limited to the packed supermarket alternatives, frozen food shipped from some developing country that, if the similarity was any consolation, was probably prepared with all the fastidiousness of cheap, if not child, labor or by men who seasoned the food on the floor as they picked their ears. I’m down to associating eating with refueling but this may change if I could enjoy food, not exotic food in expensive restaurants, out in the streets, in the sun, amidst all the traffic and pollution, that same way again.

I miss proper street food, one that is properly street you’ll be prone to hepatitis later in life, but I should be careful in giving even the slightest hint that I do. The other day I was speaking to a child neighbor and he stared blankly at me when I mentioned “dirty ice cream.”

And he thought fish comes from the tin.

The prospect that he would eat a chicken he had met is pretty low.

“Mummy, mummy!” That call to his mother almost fueled an uprising when he saw me killing a chicken in my backyard.