IT seems that in Metro Manila nowadays, consumers are increasingly becoming exasperated about the soaring prices of everything, specifically vegetables and pork.
I remember the old folks who used to say: Mabuti pa sa probinsiya hindi ka magugutom. Pipitasin mo lang sa bakuran o sa bukid ang araw-araw na kakainin.
As someone who spent his early youth in the province, I took it for granted that the blessings of the good Earth were there for the taking. Fruits and vegetables were plucked from the backyard. Chicken roamed everywhere. Many of our neighbors who were poor simple people kept a pig or two, being fattened for special occasions such as weddings or the town fiesta.
I wish that I took the subject Gardening more seriously in my elementary days. Frankly, I don’t have a green thumb. I was not skilled or cut out for it. But I managed to grow some mustasa and pechay in my small gardening “plot.” A little gardening know-how would have been handy today.
My interest in gardening was rekindled by a video series on YouTube, which my wife and I have been avidly watching as a break from movies on streaming platforms. It features a pretty young Chinese woman named Li Ziqi who not only grows her own food, but cooks them in various appetizing ways, and even does carpentry and crafts work so excellently it would put the male species to shame.
My Google search has unearthed some facts about Li Ziqi: she lives in the mountains and forests in a village somewhere in Sichuan Province, in the northwestern part of China.
What her vlogs show is that she doesn’t need to go to the market for her daily needs. She gets the stuff to cook her meals from her backyard garden and the nearby forest. My wife and I never cease to watch her in admiration as she goes through her plucking, uprooting, cutting, digging sweet potatoes, mushrooms, peppers, bamboo shoots and then she would wash them with fresh clean water flowing endlessly from the mountain through bamboo pipes. If she doesn’t have them, she plants them. Oh, what a bountiful harvest day after day.
One of her growing number of followers (around 58 million) says that the name Li Ziqi is of Chinese origin and it means “Gift from heaven.” What a fitting name because her vlogs are really a sensuous blessing.
Li’s videos capture her simple daily life with her grandmother to whom she appears to be devoted. Dressed in work clothes and sometimes in graceful traditional garments, Li rises at sunrise, rests at sunset, plants seeds and harvests flowers, cooks Chinese dishes and crafts bamboo furniture. She has a seemingly vast knowledge of the traditional craft, foraging and cooking. Her episodes are very educational because they show how the foods are planted and harvested in the farm. Unlike other educational videos, they are not didactic or annotated by endless chatter. She lets the visuals do the storytelling. They are so beautifully composed and edited, it’s very easy to lose hours being absorbed by the idyllic setting and her deep knowledge of food, nature and traditional ways of doing things, which must have been handed down to her by her grandfolks.
But aside from her skill in growing and foraging food, Li makes us drool with her cooking. The way she cooks, the artful way she serves the dishes—every shot is so appetizingly presented that I am reminded of three of my favorite movies: Babette’s Feast, Eat, Drink, Man, Woman and Tampopo. In these memorable films a master chef gloriously prepares an array of delectable dishes. It’s almost like food porn, if you pardon the expression. Lately, our daughter has joined our company of salivating watchers. Indeed, the best way to hold an audience is through the stomach.
Li rarely speaks in these videos but in one of her interviews she says: “Most people today are facing tremendous stress in work and life, so I hope they can feel relieved and remedied when watching my videos.” That’s very true, but they also leave us craving to go to the nearest Chinese delicatessen.
Indeed, the Earth can provide for our daily needs if only we start learning how to cultivate and produce our own food by using the traditional ways. As Li says: “There are so many ideas in my mind of old craftsmanship and food we have been enjoying for thousands of years. Some are on the verge of oblivion. I hope to preserve them through my small efforts.”
The videos are also very enlightening. People today have forgotten where their food comes from. We don’t know what it takes to grow healthy, nutritious food. These videos help urban dwellers get educated about growing and even preserving food. That’s a valuable and useful skill to have as we go through a pandemic. For instance, in just a few episodes, my wife and I learned how to bottle yellow peaches, how to make Chinese chili sauce, flower tea, dye clothes using grape peels, and even construct a clay oven or a sofa swing. Li could do it all, no sweat.
Beyond practical tips on planting, cooking and carpentry, Li Ziqi’s videos teach us a deeper universal lesson. The Earth provides a place to sustain our human needs—food, shelter, air, and basically everything we need to survive. In order for the Earth to survive we must keep these things alive and work with it to be a part of it, to be in harmony with where we live, not against it. Her example should inspire a paradigm shift in people who only know how to consume.
The scenes of planting, growing and withering, the cycle of day and night are visual reminders that we too go through cycles as human beings just as the Earth goes through cycles, just on different scales. The Earth grows and dies, it changes and shifts, it warms up and cools down; the Earth produces life and is fed back the things it creates.
They also teach us the virtue of patience, as they show the time it takes for seeds to grow into plants. One must learn to wait for time and the elements to work on the vegetables and fruits stored away for drying, pickling and fermenting. Everything in its right time.
Li combines various elements of nature in fresh new ways to prepare them and to serve them in appealing and appetizing ways. Watching her doing her thing inspires creativity and resourcefulness.
And toward the end of each episode, Li shows us how to savor the fruits of her labor in the kitchen, slowly and unhurriedly, relishing the taste and texture of each dish, in loving gratitude to the great provider.
Li’s art is no longer accorded the respect it used to enjoy in modern times. Sadly, the banal flavor of fastfood fare our children are getting used to has dulled the taste for traditional recipes that our grandmothers and mothers used to make.
At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I like to believe that Li Ziqi is a person sent by Providence to help us appreciate nature’s bountiful blessings that are within the reach of our hands. This may also be a good time to remind ourselves, and especially the children, as Fr. Jerry Orbos writes in his column, that food does not come from the grocery but from the farmers and workers who worked for it.
Thanks to her videos, I am now more appreciative of the artistry, skills and patience of people who prepare our food, starting with our mothers and wives, as well as the chefs and kitchen help who toil in the kitchen all day long. We have been so used to having our food packaged at the grocery shelves or served in a restaurant, we no longer know the long process it takes to bring it to us at our convenience—involving a long line of producers and workers, from the farmer, the harvester, the transporter, the packager and so on.
Li Ziqi’s name may mean “gift from heaven” but it really should allude to all the people who make it possible for us to eat delicious and nutritious food, from the farm to our dinner table.
But above all, “gift from heaven” should really about Mother Nature, the “giving source” which provides for us if only we make the collective effort to live in harmony with her. If we can’t be food producers, let’s at least be grateful and mindful eaters.