Stirring the Pot and the Past: Southeast Asian Food Stories

Global Cuisine Fowler Museum Talk

Thursday, October 22, 2026
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (Pacific Time)
Lenart Auditorium
Folwer Museum at UCLA
308 Charles E Young Dr N
Los Angeles, CA 90024
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Discover Indigenous Filipino food traditions and how food carries memory, strengthens community, and connects generations.

Food can change how we tell the history of Southeast Asia. This panel looks at Filipino and Indonesian use of rice, taro, millet, coconut, spices, and crops introduced through trade and colonial contact. Rice is often treated as a timeless part of life across the region. Archaeology and history, however, reveal a more complex story. In the Philippines and Indonesia, rice cultivation, consumption, and meaning changed across places and periods, as did other food staples and traditions. These shifts invite questions about how and why communities altered what they grew, ate, exchanged, and valued. In the context of the Mountain Spirits exhibit, "stirring the past" means using food to reopen questions about history. Cuisine offers a way to trace movement, trade, colonialism, Indigenous choices, and the making of identities across island Southeast Asia, while asking how present-day food traditions shape what we imagine about the past.

Speakers:

  • Marlon Martin is the chief operating officer of the Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement (SITMo), a community-based heritage conservation organization, and a dedicated advocate for the preservation of cultural heritage and sustainable development in the Philippines.
  • Stephen B. Acabado is professor of anthropology and director of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
  • Arnoud Arps is a Rubicon Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Media and Memory Studies at UCLA. He is assistant professor of extended cinema, film heritage, and memory at the University of Amsterdam.

Moderator: Vina A. Lanzona is professor of history at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.



Pay-by-hour parking is available in Parking Structure 4 - 221 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095.


Sponsor(s): Southeast Asian Studies, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Fowler Museum at UCLA