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Filipino American cuisine has been present in America ever since Filipinos moved there, but only recently^[when?] has the Filipino food become more widely popular.^[1] Filipino food has gone through its evolution of adapting other cultures' food practices into their own, or borrowing the food concept into their own.^[2]

Filipinos took their food and debut it as they came to America by presenting it in catering and opening up the Philippines' most popular food chain, Jollibee.^[1] There is also a long list of different Filipino types of dishes that represent Filipino Americans.^[3]

American influence

American influence on Filipino food is how some authentic meal was turned into frozen, ready-cooked meals.^[4] This technique was used on Filipino dishes when Marigold Commodities Corporation teamed up with Ditta Meat Food Service Company to create these frozen Filipino meals.^[4] They started in Austin, Texas, and released a few dishes that would incorporate the meat of America with Philippine flavors to create Filipino American food.^[4]

Types of food

There were four of these Americanized Filipino dishes released into Texas under the work of Marigold Commodities and Ditta Meat Food Service.^[4] Beef tapa uses Texas meat marinated with garlic, citrus flavors, and soy sauce, then grilled or fried.^[4] The other dishes are tocino using chicken and pork meat, and pork longaniza.^[4]

Restaurants

Catering

The Filipino restaurant trend of catering is continued in many restaurants such as Sunda in Chicago and Purple Yam in Brooklyn.^[1] They have also continued to sell typical Filipino dishes in bulk such as lechon.^[1]

Types of Filipino American dishes

A typical Filipino American dish consists of a soup, ulam (any food), kanin (rice), type of meat, fruits, and dipping sauces.^[3]

Different soups may include things such as Munnggo gisado masabaw, a soup consisting of Mung beans and pork or shrimp. Another soup dish is pancit molo,^[3] a Filipino style of the Chinese wonton soup. Meat dishes include adobo^[3] made with pork or chicken; the dish is then cooked with vinegar, soy sauce, and garlic.^[3]

Suman banana leaves containing sticky rice can be dipped in sugar to make it sweeter. Taho is a dessert that uses a syrup and boba inside of a jello-like soybean material.^[3] There are numerous different Filipino dishes, and these are only a couple of them.^[3]

Staples in Filipino food

Rice

Rice is a staple to Filipinos more than how cereal is known to be a basic breakfast food. Rice is used to help intensify some flavors,^[2] or create other Filipino dishes like puto and bibingka. Puto can be meat-filled, ube-filled, or turned into cakes; it is made by making rice into flour.^[2]

Rice is also created into a dessert called suman, a sweet rice wrapped in a leaf from a coconut or banana.^[2]

Coconut

Coconut, like rice, is another staple in Filipino dishes; it is known as, buko, in the Philippine language and can be used in drinks, main dishes, or desserts.^[2] There are dishes native to a specific region such as how in Quezon they make a dish using a leaf-wrapped shrimp, buko strips, and cook it in buko water.^[2] Another region uses buko to mix it with chicken and ginger and cooking it inside of the buko; they also make a noodle dish where the noodles are made of coconut.^[2] The white insides of the coconut are used to make milk, ginataan, and halo-halo, among others.^[2]

Filipino American health

Food and health

A 2012 study across Asian American subgroups in Southern California (Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese Americans) found that Filipino Americans self-reported the highest body mass indexes (BMIs).^[5] This is because after the migration of Filipinos to the U.S. their diets changed and showed to have increase in energy-dense food, processed food, decrease in fruits, vegetables.^[5]

This seems to have has a negative effect on the body leading to increase body weight and other health-related problems.^[5] Specifically in Filipino American diets, there was an increase in milk, meat consumption, less starchy food and snacks.^[5] This increase in eating by Filipinos has led to an increase in the calorie intake. This increase was almost doubled and along with it was a double in protein consumption and triple consumption of fat.^[5]

United States and Canada

There was a study done in Canada on the average Filipino woman's health focusing mainly on the idea of body size, eating, and health.^[6] Western culture has spread an idea that there is a concept of "healthy" and this concept in terms of woman would be that there is an association with being thin is attractive and vice versa for being fatter.^[6] The study was then analyzed and what was found is that there was a risk of being "fat" associated with eating rice and an association of being thinner when watching^{[clarification needed]} fat and rice.^[6]