Ibagiw Fest conducts First Food Writing Workshop

Seventeen budding pen pushers joined a workshop entitled, “Stories on a Plate: Writing Food, Culture, and Place”, focusing on basic food writing, Nov. 15, at Baguio Convention and Cultural Center, as part of this year’s Ibagiw Festival’s Gastro x Art Food Crawl activity.

Conducted for the first time, the workshop aims to foster the practice of food writing by taking a deeper look at the origin, practice and culture behind the food and each writer was tasked to visit and write about a participating restaurant.

“Last year’s Ibagiw Festival, we had small events related to poetry writing [and] poetry reading, organized by the [literary] sector. This year, we proposed to do the food writing because it’s not a stand-alone because it’s tied to other activities, which is the gastro art crawl, so it’s a celebration of the food, the arts and the culture,” Ms. Liezl Dunuan, of the Creative Baguio City Council (CBCC) Advisory Board on Literary Sector, said.

Kaye Leah Sitchon, a three-time Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Food Writing Award winner and an instructor at Saint Louis University, graced the workshop and shared her experience in food writing. She also gave out food article samples from other culinary writers.She said that writing about food is digging deep into human experience – a gut experience, where it unpacks a person’s emotions and vulnerability as they taste the food.

Sitchon added that writers should write the way they speak, express authenticity and convey the writer’s personality.

“You are what you eat,” she stressed. – Jaeda Pad-eng/PIO Intern/Gaby Keith