Filipino Food and the plight of Toronto Filipino Nannies

How times have changed! When we immigrated to Canada from the Philippines back in 1965, there were basically no Filipino nannies in Canada; most Filipinos were were not nannies, they were professionals of another sort (nurses, engineers, etc.). Now, many of the Filipino immigrants in our major cities are nannies.

Fiesta Friday is a great article which manages to be both a nice introduction to Filipino food (reading about the food in the article made me drool: Beef Pochero, Bistek, Kare-kare, mmm!) as well as documenting the hard working life of Filipino nannies in Toronto.

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Filipinos are the third largest ethnic group of Asian descent in Canada after the Chinese and East Indians. But unlike both those groups, they're still considered an invisible minority.

While there are several Chinatowns, a Little India and a Koreatown in Toronto, there is no Little Manila. Perhaps this is because, according to sociologists, Filipinos tend to adapt to and blend in with the prevailing culture.

This adaptive attitude extends to Filipino food, which is an amalgamation of the cuisine of the country's former colonizers (Spain, U.S. and Japan), its old world trading partners like China and the Middle East, and the indigenous Malays. This lack of distinct character (among other factors, including lack of presentation) that often makes Filipino food unpopular with outsiders.

In Toronto, Filipino immigrants (often health professionals) started arriving in the 1970s and 1980s, and flocked to the highrises of St. James Town. Today, popular destinations include Thorncliffe Park, Mississauga and Scarborough, and parts of Bathurst St., Eglinton Aves. E. and W., Pape Ave. and Davisville Ave

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