From ‘Pond-to-Table’ - Aklan, Philippines.
A recent craze in the West has become the notion of ‘Farm-to-Table’, but what about ‘Pond-to-Table’?
I know I said it in my last Story/Photo Series, but you honestly cannot get any fresher than harvesting fish that same day to be cooked later and put right on to your plate. In the West, we often succumb to a delusional disconnect between what we consume and how it got there; even going so far as to label (aka. Market) certain animals with different names by the time they hit store shelves. (Example: Pig becomes Pork, Cow transforms into Beef, and Chicken gains the chique title of Poultry).
No doubt this disconnect has led to many altered patterns of eating (veganism, vegetarianism, pescatarianism, just to name a few) with only a select few ever coming to realize the honest truth: life eats life (sorry to say, even plants were once alive).
When directly witnessing where our food actually comes from, and mitigating the distance between farm (or pond) and table, one begins to build a reverence for what it is that we eat, while also respecting those who helped get it to our table.
Seen here: a bunch of us visiting my Uncle Urvil’s (yes, we share the same name ☺) Fish Pond to bring back some food to be cooked later that day. This isn’t factory farming—this is Filipino farming.
Fun Fact: the people you see in the photos are not actually weeding through mud in order to catch fish. What they really do is drain the various ponds (unfortunately, I was a bit late to capture this) and then the workers go around picking up stray fish for harvest.
-learn, eat and grow.
