Global Cuisine: Stirring the Pot and the Past—Southeast Asian Food Stories
IN PERSON
Food can change how we tell the history of Southeast Asia. This panel looks at Filipino and Indonesian use of rice, taro, millet, coconut, spices, and crops introduced through trade and colonial contact. Rice is often treated as a timeless part of life across the region. Archaeology and history, however, reveal a more complex story. In the Philippines and Indonesia, rice cultivation, consumption, and meaning changed across places and periods, as did other food staples and traditions. These shifts invite questions about how and why communities altered what they grew, ate, exchanged, and valued. In the context of the Mountain Spirits exhibit, “stirring the past” means using food to reopen questions about history. Cuisine offers a way to trace movement, trade, colonialism, Indigenous choices, and the making of identities across island Southeast Asia, while asking how present-day food traditions shape what we imagine about the past.
Marlon Martin is the chief operating officer of the Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement (SITMo), a community-based heritage conservation organization, and a dedicated advocate for the preservation of cultural heritage and sustainable development in the Philippines.
Stephen B. Acabado is professor of anthropology and director of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
Arnoud Arps is a Rubicon Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Media and Memory Studies at UCLA. He is assistant professor of extended cinema, film heritage, and memory at the University of Amsterdam.
Moderator: Vina A. Lanzona is professor of history at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
This program is co-sponsored by the Philippines Consulate General in Los Angeles
Image credit: Installation view, Mountain Spirits: Rice and Indigeneity in the Northern Luzon Highlands, Philippines, 2026, Fowler Museum at UCLA. Photo: Elon Schoenholz
