Facebook page of DGF (Doreen G. Fernandez) Writing Award
By Margaux Salcedo/Philippine Daily Inquirer – The DGF Essay Writing Awards—the country’s first and most prestigious food writing contest inspired by Philippine culinary writing icon Doreen Gamboa Fernandez—is now open for entries for this year’s competition.
Writers may submit up to two entries of 800 words each under a pen name to dgfawards@yahoo.com.ph by Oct. 31, then separately e-mail information indicating pen name, real name, title of essay, e-mail, contact number and address.
The theme for this year’s competition is—fish.
“As with the previous topic fowl, we hope to get stories of different fishes, ways of cooking, research into the different kinds of fish,” explained Micky Fenix, one of the founders of the writing competition.
The competition aims to answer the question, “Is fish important in our food culture?”
I have yet to study the importance of fish in our food culture but after the controversies the past few weeks in Recto Bank, I know for sure that fish is of great importance to our economy.
To recall, last June 9, it was reported that a Chinese vessel hit a Filipino fishing boat and had it not been for the help of nearby Vietnamese fishermen who responded to their distress calls, the 22 Filipino fishermen aboard would certainly have died.
Immediately after the incident, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. and even presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo denounced the actions of those in the Chinese vessel for abandoning the Filipinos.
Panelo, calling the desertion “inhuman as it is barbaric.”
But a few days later, the President himself brushed off the allision as “a little maritime incident.”
He added later that the Chinese vessel did not ram but only sideswiped the Filipino vessel.
