In a nondescript building on Ongpin Street, just a few meters from where it meets Teodora Alonzo Street, the famed Chinese herbalist, “Doctor” Daniel Tan has been seeing patients for over 30 years.
In just five minutes of consultation, he will feel your pulse, check your tongue and then write out a prescription. He is brusque and impatient, has never heard of the concept of doctor-patient confidentiality and will announce your ailments, with the appropriate cures and warnings, to the packed room of patients awaiting their turn.
Chinese and Filipino faces alike fill the room; some have come from faraway, hoping for cures to cancer, liver and pancreatic ailments, gallstones, and high blood pressure.
Whether Tan the Elder and his less ornery apprentice Tan the Younger are miracle workers or quacks is something for others to find out. I drop in when I’m in that part of town because, at P400 for a consultation, one doesn’t have much to lose; although the prescribed black brew, to be sipped nightly, is not pleasant.
‘Don’t eat chicken’
But more interesting is what Tan enjoins people not to eat. Avoid venison, he told me. Also pawikan. (This is a good thing to do for many reasons.) This has bewildered patients: “Don’t eat chicken.”
I was able to bring up the topic with a number of my friends, even those who had not been to the good medicine man Mr. Tan. Some of these friends revealed that they had also been advised by nutritionists to cut chicken out of their diets.
Others had read some article or another, and decided to eschew chicken—swearing that, after a few weeks, they started feeling more lively, allergies cleared up, and immunity was boosted.
This distresses me greatly, because aside from liking chicken a great deal as a food, it’s the last meat that doesn’t have any religious taboos on it. It’s the meat of peace. It is in fried chicken joints where you will find Muslim and Jew, Christian and Hindu alike, worshipping at the altar of poultry. It is the great democratizer, because anyone can afford a KFC meal; even top chefs can be found huddled in the neighborhood branch after dinner service. It was what kept me alive during my two impoverished years of Master’s studies in the United Kingdom.
After my Philosophy studies, my finances were freed up a little, and I graduated to a higher echelon of chicken subsistence: Nando’s. It’s a South African chain selling “Portuguese-style” chicken (though it’s really African, but that wouldn’t sell as well) and one of the best meals that you can get in the United Kingdom; though this, in turn, is a pale shadow of what one can get in Johannesburg, where they don’t turn down the heat.
Good in its own way
I’m surprised that Nando’s has not opened a branch here, since even the most obscure franchises are coming in. What we have here is Peri-Peri Charcoal Chicken, which is not quite the same thing but is very good in its own way.
Peri-peri chicken is eaten across southern Africa, from Cape Town all the way up to Mozambique, with some local variants, such as chicken in a marinade of hot chillies, paprika and garlic. But peri-peri chicken is a great thing in itself, and its execution at the low-key, well-priced Peri-Peri Charcoal Chicken joint (I ate at the Greenhills Promenade branch) is beyond reproach. It’s best to go there at mealtimes, rather than off-hours, because the grill is already hot and the sear more delicious.
I’m at a loss as to why people aren’t packing into its cozy dining rooms where there’s a selection of sauces from a cart. I thought most were not to my taste, but then that’s the point of a sauce bar: You have to find what you like.
The portions are generous, and there’s a good variety to the side dishes.
While I can fully recommend Peri-Peri Charcoal Chicken restaurant, I remain unassuaged over my fears of a slow death by chicken.
Subsistence food
As a meat, it has replaced fish as the subsistence food of the urban middle and lower classes (supermarkets have chalkboards with a “Chicken Price Monitor,” the way one would watch stock prices or exchange rates). Fast-food chains are known for their onerous price ceilings for their suppliers, forcing the price of raw chicken lower and lower, which ripples backwards to the supply chain, causing even more cuts and compromises in the raising of poultry.
Increasingly, food paranoia is forcing the few people who can afford it to live in a food sourcing bubble, buying only imported milk, eggs and meat, and choosing frozen imported vegetables over fresh local ones. This is a kind of isolationism that cannot be sustained in the long term.
Yet, as long as people continue to choose chicken based on price alone and demand no further accountability nor regulation, the favored meat of the people may turn out to be its poison. Perhaps Dr. Tan is on to something, after all.
Peri-Peri Charcoal Chicken, 2/F Promenade, Greenhills Shopping Center, San Juan; tel. 5655146.
