KitcheNomer: The Journey from the Kitchen to the Community of the Needy

July 8, 2022

Preparing a traditional meal during a family get-together on a warm Sunday afternoon.*

The Filipino housing design culture is unwittingly characterized by structural “wholeness” quite unlike its European and American colonizers’ architecture that distinctly separates each room according to function. The “pre-colonial uncontaminated” Filipino home is a clustered hall of bed, sofa, dining, and kitchen, all in one. While the colonial habitation culture was eventually imbibed and houses grew bigger as the days reach the contemporary generation, the Filipino family dwelling occupancy continued to be structured where the various divisions of the house are interlinked. Notice that parents always would want access to all the divisions of the house.

Integrated into this structurally intimate occupancy of the house is the role of the kitchen and food. At an early age, children are exposed to their kitchen education from dishwashing to ingredients cutting and soon, to cooking. Indigenously unique in this kitchen-cooking food and techniques is a virtuous worldview. The Filipino culinary culture extends beyond the necessity for survival; it is also an expression of love, creating family bonding, giving sustenance for the survival of the family, and most importantly, kitchen cooking is for someone else in need and passing these values to the next generation.

Reaching out to indigents at the landfill community in Barangay Felisa, Bacolod City.*

Over the years, this kitchen nurturing pattern honed Nomer Q. Lobaton. He recalled those years when the traditional food preparation played a huge part in their family get-together usually on Sundays. Nomer’s family believes in what Dr, Kelly H. Haws, a scholar-researcher on “food decision making”, taught that “food traditions within families ultimately tie us together, connecting us both to one another and to our past. They’re often associated with passing along part of our heritage, the special or ‘secret’ recipes of our ancestors.”

“Everyone in the family can cook adobo!” Nomer mused.

The conceptualization and launching then of his YouTube Channel “KITCHENOMER” are not instantaneous-spur moment imagination but a gradual mustering of childhood ideas and a circumspect response to the pressing needs of the times. The journey towards the production launch of KITCHENOMER was relatively intricate; from the Nomer, a young urban professional (Yuppie) successfully cruising the corporate world in pursuit of a career in retail, sales, marketing, and events management to developing himself into a marketing strategist, subsequently syncretizing the retention of his mother’s joyous kitchen education legacy into the Nomer, a producer/host of the KITCHENOMER video production.

Cooking in the kitchen with Mom, we made healthy rice noodles soup for two families in the community.*

Along came the COVID-19 pandemic’s overwhelming pressure that caused thousands to go hungry.

KITCHENOMER, while conceived to showcase the wonderfully varied Filipino food traditions in the most engaging way but entertaining in its approach, transformed itself into a journey towards the feeding of the helpless and needy.

Nomer’s KITCHENOMER is not just the typical “how to’s” of cooking on social media platforms but is likewise strategized to be an “expression of love, cooking for someone else in need and passing these values to the next generation”, brought forth by the Filipino kitchen habitation worldview and as taught by his mother. With invited guests, KITCHENOMER viewers are taught the art and process of food preparation with the hope that the finished product will be used to feed the community of the hungry, the KITCHENOMER “philosophical way” of discipline and family values offered in the kitchen as the germinating point of love to the neighbors in dire need of food.

Indeed, together with a network of supporters all positively enlightened by the pandemic-born self-realization, they saw hundreds of residents around them and in various depressed hard-hit communities go hungry and their toddlers malnourished. Nomer and supporters gathered their resources and their loving hands to prepare nutritious food and personally distributed them house-to-house to avoid crowding. The feeding to commemorate the June 19 Father’s Day 2022 was among the recent events Nomer and company held. There were more, from feeding hundreds of downtown residents and street children, to the homeless ravaged by Typhoon Odette last December, to the feeding of the Mansilingan Home for the Blind, to the hundreds of those dwelling around the Bacolod’s landfill, KITCHENOMER aims to give food to the thousands in total, the hungry and the poorest of the poor.

Nomer said, “We offer ourselves in service to ease hunger and improve the health and well-being of the underprivileged. We are all in this pandemic together. Let us roll our sleeves up, wash our hands, and stay busy in the kitchen” – for the love of neighbor as thyself.* (Gil Alfredo B. Severino)