Maria Gallardo, mother of Luc Cagadoc, a grade 2 student, has filed a formal complaint with the school board after Luc was disciplined by a lunch program monitor at Ecole Lalande for eating with a spoon and fork, a common practice among Filipinos.

The story first appeared in Chronicle newspaper last month titled “Filipino table etiquette punished at local school. Lunch monitor tells student his eating habits are ‘yucky” and “disgusting.’”

The boy reported the incident to his mother only last month after being punished by his school’s lunch program monitor more than 10 times this year for eating with a spoon and fork instead of eating with a fork and knife.

“Mommy, I don’t want to eat anymore,” Gallardo says Luc told her at the kitchen table April 11. “My teacher is telling me that eating with a spoon and fork is yucky and disgusting.”

In Montreal, Philippine Ambassador to Canada Jose Brillantes, in a statement, said the embassy was working with outraged Filipinos living in Canada to pursue the case. “The embassy considers the alleged incident an affront to Filipino culture,” Brillantes added. “To assert one’s accepted eating practices, which after all are most proper and which have become part of one’s cultural identity is, in fact, encouraged under the Canadian immigration policy.”

In Manila, leftist protesters, some clad in posters of spoon and fork, picketed the Canadian embassy May 5 in support of Luc. The protesters urged the Canadian government to immediately reprimand officials of the Roxboro town school.

Canadian Ambassador to the Philippines Peter Sutherland called it an “isolated incident” that shouldn’t hurt bilateral ties. “Practically everyone in Canada, specifically the second and third generations are immigrants, so we are sympathetic to the values and culture of immigrants,” he told reporters.

Upset over Luc’s story, Gallardo confronted the lunchtime caregiver the next day and on April 13, she telephoned the school’s principal, Normand Bergeron. His reaction brought her to tears, she says. “His response was shocking to me,” Gallardo, who moved to Montreal from the Philippines in 1999, told The Chronicle. “He said, ‘Madame, you are in Canada. Here in Canada you should eat the way Canadians eat.’

“I find it very prejudiced and it’s racist. He’s supposed to be acting like a professional. This is supposed to be a free country with free expressions of culture and religion. This is how we eat; we eat with a fork and spoon.”

Luc’s father, Aldrin Cagadoc, was also surprised by the comment. “I can’t believe even the principal would say that,” he said. “A person of that calibre, I wouldn’t expect him to say that.”

Gallardo, who operates a day care out of her Roxboro home and is close to completing her studies in early childhood education, wrote a letter last week and lodged a formal complaint to the Commission scolaire Marguerite Bourgeoys (CSMB).

She disagrees with the lunch monitor’s approach to teaching children how to eat and says it is emotionally abusive to Luc. When she questioned Bergeron about punishing students for their table habits, she says he replied that, “If your son eats like a pig he has to go to another table because this is the way we do it and how we’re going to do it every time.”