SOURCE: Casper, Leonard. “Bangungot and the Philippine Dream in Hagedorn.” Solidarity 127 (July-September 1990): 152-57.

In the following essay, Casper discusses how food functions as a symbol of economic inequality in the Philippines in Dogeaters and criticizes the novel for its underdeveloped characters and weak narrative structure.

No one familiar with the culture of the Philippines would underestimate the pleasure, beyond the threshold of taste, that eating provides for its people. The immense variety of available foods conveys a felicitous sense of tropical abundance; the diversity of savory preparations, a heritage drawn from mixed national origins; the surfeit of calories, unconscious compensation for an enervating climate or an expression of the bahala na (come what may) fiesta attitude: consume today what the day provides, let tomorrow take care of itself. Filipinos and food are more than alliterative. They are intimately inseparable, throughout all their waking hours. Of course, such extravagant...