Mango

Mango. Colored pencil on 9"x12" Bristol Board.

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"Mongo, mango, guinamos kag mango."

Taken from a made-up song we sang when we were kids. The original words were "Mongo, mongo, guinamos kag mongo." "Mongo" is a mung bean dish commonly eaten by the poor and guinamos is a smelly paste of fermented minute shrimps. My husband loves both mongo dish and mango. My children are mango connoisseurs.

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Back to fruits. Asians brag about their mangoes. Mango is the national fruit of the Philippines, also of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The sweetest cultivar comes from the small island province of Guimaras near Iloilo and my birth province, Negros Occidental. During the summer season, the central markets are full of golden mangoes stacked in rows, a beautiful sight! Because mango trees require a lot of land and space, growing up, in our treeless house in the city, I always thought that families with mango trees were very lucky and rich. When we moved to the suburbs, Mother planted three mango trees in her garden. The fruit bowl in our dining table always had mangoes, papayas, bananas and seasonal fruits. I love mangoes.

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Humans have a tendency to make anything that is good bigger. Last summer my husband and I went to Whole Foods market and saw the biggest mangoes I have ever seen. They were a product of agricultural genetic experiment conducted in Costa Rica with a Texas agricultural university. It looked perfect and beautiful and huge! I bought one and was hugely disappointed. It was bland and dry, a far cry from the organic mangoes I knew. It did not even taste like a mango. In mangoes, bigger does not necessarily mean better.