BACOLOD CITY—At the Terra Madre Asia & Pacific, surrounded and overwhelmed by dishes, beverages, and flavors, I thought a lot about food.
Food, to borrow the words of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, is “good to think with,” and surely I’m not alone in doing so, especially in the wake of the Michelin Guide’s arrival in the country. Indeed, some of the newly minted Michelin-starred and -selected chefs were present: Hapag and Toyo set up shop on the street food alley alongside Aling Lucing Sisig and Siargao’s famed Roots; Chele González, Miko Calo, Aaron Isip, Johanne Siy, to name just a few illustrious gastronomic celebrities—were in attendance.
As in various countries with proud culinary cultures like Mexico and Thailand, the Michelin unveiling has ignited an (un)savory debate about the nature of food, some around questions of national identity and equity, others about the selection itself. With or without Michelin stars, however, local restaurants are worth supporting, especially those that are trying to embrace local ingredients and techniques. As a Metro Manila native, I’m happy to have tried most of the restaurants over the years. Those tastings—and my conversations with the chefs, as well as with the Department of Tourism’s Paulo Tugbang, who has championed food tourism and introduced me to some of the restaurants—have informed my ruminations about food.
Such immersion has allowed me to see how, beyond gastronomic glory to a handful of chefs, recognitions like Michelin (despite valid critiques like the guide’s “elite, Eurocentric history”) can boost our tourism and food sectors, adding spice and “culinary cultural capital” to cities like Manila and Cebu which are increasingly overlooked by tourists who go straight to Palawan, Boracay, or Siargao. The recognition of the restaurants, which serve as training grounds for the culinary arts, can also raise the global profile of Filipino cuisine and bolster the careers of our aspiring chefs. Given their commitment to local ingredients and traditional techniques (something encouraged by Michelin), the restaurants are also helping to revive interest in local products and practices. Bohol’s asin tibuok, for instance, is a regular presence in the starred restaurants, and is the fitting icing on Toyo’s leche flan ice cream.
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Here in the weeklong festival in November—described by its parent Slow Food movement as “a gathering of food communities championing good, clean, and fair food”—the conversation was broader and deeper than the selection of restaurants in Manila, its environs, and Cebu. The Slow Food movement, after all, has been around since the 1980s and has spread from Italy to all over the world, including the Asia Pacific, to promote food that’s “good, clean, and fair.” And it has taken root in various communities in the country, from Pasil to Davao, with many chapters in between.
There were various talks and tastings—and I myself participated in a panel on the connection of our beverages with Mexico, sharing the stage with Kalel Demetrio, who has championed lambanog and conjured a venerable ube liqueur, and Victor Esmeris, a longtime producer of lambanog in Liliw, Laguna, and whose mango-flavored creation I greatly enjoyed.
The food, however, spoke for itself, and what it communicated, above all, is the diversity of ingredients, techniques, and traditions. Our famous dishes were rightfully placed in the limelight: There were lots of lechon (not just baboy but also baka) and the ube lover in me was delighted at the number of ube-flavored treats.
There was also a tantalizing array of little-known products: all sorts of heirloom rice (red, brown, black) and all kinds of carbohydrates other than rice (root crops from Leyte, millet from Batanes, adlai from Mindanao).
One star of the show was batwan or batuan (Garcinia binucao), a sour fruit endemic to the Philippines. A longtime souring agent in Ilonggo and Negrense cuisine that I first encountered as an ice cream flavor in Iloilo, it is being embraced by chefs. Chef Aaron Isip’s seafood halo-halo using the fruit as base, in his flagship Kasa Palma, is one of the most memorable dishes I’ve tasted this year.
The dishes also conveyed, even if far more implicitly, connection. Inspired by the writings of Doreen Fernandez and others who have imagined a Filipino culinary identity, we rightfully celebrate “our” food, and we are only beginning to (re)discover this through the codifying—and edifying—efforts of writers like Felice Prudente Sta. Maria and Ige Ramos as well as content creators like Abi Marquez and Erwan Heussaff.
But food has always been about connection with other places—and this connection is part of just national or regional identity, as Fernandez also noted, particularly in the newly-reprinted Sarap. Bacolod’s own Casa del Formaggio, for instance, makes cheese using Italian artisanal techniques, and the cow itself—baka from the Spanish vaca—is not native to the Philippines. The Mexicans may have learned the technique to make mezcal from Filipino sailors who made lambanog, but our beloved Criollo cacao is itself from their part of the world, even as surely its centuries of taking root in the country have it distinct, special, and, yes, local in its own right.
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It was difficult to choose between Mark Lobaton’s kinilaw or sili-sili (Bago River eel), and just as difficult to choose which craft beers and local wines to sample. Such bewildering choice, however, was in stark contrast with the food outside, which is characterized by homogeneity and convenience, fast food instead of “slow food,” instant coffee or tea instead of “slow drinks.” Beyond special events and special (and often expensive) meals, how can we normalize good, clean, and fair food—and how can we make it accessible and affordable?
To answer these questions, we must first revisit how we arrived here. Alas, today’s urbanized lifestyles and work demands mean that people have to turn to what is fast, filling, and familiar. Even if I would heartily recommend root crops, for instance, I fully understand that white rice is simply the most convenient and accessible staple—and one that complements our viands. And even if I can sing praises to the Bicol tilefish in Chef Aaron Isip’s Kasa Palma, I will realistically have to settle for milkfish for my everyday meals.
A related, and deeper, factor is the commodification and industrialization of food, which has favored a small number of marketable products—and shaped the products themselves. Thanks to global supply chains and the marvels of modern agriculture, we can buy golden kiwis from New Zealand, apples from China, and even blueberries from Mexico, in our supermarkets, but not from Iloilo or my favorite tabô from Palawan; for many of the things that end up in grocery shelves, what counts as the bottom line is, not nutrition, but shelf life, cost, and flavor.
Related to this is displacement—of communities, of knowledge, of culinary memory. Since patis can now just be a flavor, the communities who make traditional patis—defined by the Food and Drug Administration as the “the clear liquid sauce, straw yellow to amber in color, obtained from the enzymatic fermentation of the mixture of fish and shrimp and common salt”—may no longer be able to hold on to their techniques, in the same way that because of “our bondage to rice,” the techniques to prepare root crops across the country are vanishing.
Meanwhile, conversations about promoting our food are trapped in questions of identity. Because rice is imagined as central to who we are, our discourse revolves around self-sufficiency in rice, rather than how other grains and crops might enrich our diets. Regionalistic debates on authenticity hold back the cultivation of national industries and hold back efforts to promote products like lambanog. Can we truly “own” food at the level of region or nation? Do we have exclusive rights to ube; do the Japanese hold exclusive rights to matcha? Surely it is important to acknowledge origins and protect foodways, especially in the face of cultural appropriation and economic dispossession. But how do we do so without holding back gastronomy, which is as much about innovation as it is about heritage?
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These questions are difficult to answer. Still, the rise of the Slow Food community offers hope that the current food paradigm can be resisted—and not only in haute cuisine spaces. As the success of Terra Madre shows, there is a growing community of people committed to these ideals, and they are not just hacenderos or affluent retirees but also farmers, fishers, food producers, cooks, and artisans, as well as activists and foodies like me. Through venues like this, they find both voice and community.
Perhaps what I can offer is to second the motion that beyond identity, food is all about connection.
First, connection with nature. Any kind of food—including Filipino food—is first and foremost food, and so we must reflect on whether food practices respect our relationship with nature. As Fernandez wrote, our native cuisine is “one born out of the land and the landscape, the weather and the seasons, as well as out of the means and lifestyles of people in an agricultural society.”
Our connection with nature can make us pay attention to ingredients we have overlooked, at the same time ensuring that our nature is protected, mindful that food production can damage the environment in various ways, from the use of pesticides to the carbon emissions of industrial agriculture. In this, the tastemakers—from Michelin-starred chefs to influencers like Heussaff—are taking the lead in encouraging use to re-embrace green and sustainable practices. Thankfully, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the chefs I met are very much into embracing and protecting nature. In Linamnam, for instance, Don Baldosano, a Michelin Young Chef Award recipient, has created ice cream out of cogon, and I can imagine more creativity and playfulness in our restaurants in the future. But the government needs to step in with laws and policies if we are to realize sustainable and structural reforms that actually protect our environment.
Second, connection with our communities. The Philippines is a tropical country, and there is abundance around us if we move beyond supermarkets and malls into public markets, farms, and fisher cooperatives. While some artisanal products are expensive, others—like root crops—are actually cheaper and sometimes just lying in our backyards. Tastemakers can help raise their profile, sustaining artisanal traditions and “Ark of Taste” products like asin tibuok, while helping ensure that the farmers, fishers, and artisans behind them are fairly compensated and supported. As the ethnobotanist Danny Childs, who was in attendance, wrote in Slow Drinks: “Educating ourselves on the cultural ingredients and techniques, and when possible, connecting with these communities to help ensure accurate representation of their cuisine is key.”
Third, connection with the world. If we embrace heritage not as something to be owned but shared, then we should welcome the experimentation and creativity that move food forward. A Japanese restaurant can flourish in Manila, and that’s okay. A Filipino chef can open an “unapologetically inauthentic” Thai restaurant on Morato Avenue, and that’s also okay. Just as Ige Ramos has written of Cavite’s cuisine, food is the product of so many, and again, that’s something to be celebrated, not glossed over. A static, ethnonationalist view of food—or what anthropologists have called “gastronationalism”—can hold back the possibilities that lie with our food. In this, I echo Lisandro Claudio’s invocation of Resil Mojares, when the National Artist called on us to “reconcile ‘internationalizing’ and ‘nationalizing’ positions.”
Finally, connection with our own selves. Our palates are shaped by our personal experiences and our unique physical backgrounds, and as embodied beings, we should be mindful of our bodies as well as their relationship with the food and drink we consume. Surely we can allow ourselves an occasional sip of bignay wine or a pandan cocktail, but we can draw motivation from how our health and nutrition can immensely benefit from slow food. At the same time, we should acknowledge—and indeed, celebrate—the fact that eating and drinking are deeply humanistic activities that are a matter of not just health but also of pleasure and, yes, connection.
And so alongside the batwan I brought home to my mom, I left Bacolod with much inspiration from a resurgent culinary culture—and a growing, thriving Slow Food movement—that, like our food itself, is meant to be shared.
Gideon Lasco is an anthropologist and physician currently serving as professorial lecturer at the University of the Philippines Diliman and as Takemi Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. A Palanca Award-winning essayist and longtime commentator on health, culture and society, he is the author of five books, including “The Philippines Is Not a Small Country” (2020), a winner of the National Book Award.
