It’s Filipino Food Month 2024

After last month’s celebration of Women’s Month, we are off to the next big event to toast local food. A proponent of what is now a law designating April as Filipino Food month is the Philippine Culinary Heritage Movement (PCHM), a private sector-led advocacy group led by chef Jam Melchor along with book author Nina Daza-Puyat, food editors Nana Ozaeta and Marilen Fontanilla. During her watch as Department of Agriculture (DA) Undersecretary for High Value Crops, Evelyn Laviña supported this bill until it became a law. If you ask me, why was there a need to enact a law for this?

Because it was simply getting easy to forget our own food recipes with the deluge of foreign brands and international-themed restaurants, food imports and ingredients coming into the country. We needed something to remind everyone where we came from – from pre-colonial Philippines, the Spanish times and then the Hollywood influence which has remained in our pop culture and continues to dominate our food scene.

The coming of tourists from China also brought about new trends like hot pots, as Korean telenovelas and K-pop introduced Korean fried chicken and maintained old Korean favorites kimchi and bulgogi in the Pinoy menus. In the 70s when droves of Japanese tourists first came to Manila, that was also when we also started serving sushi, sashimi and ramen. And when we learned to eat tempura and sukiyaki.

If one were to wake up only today or be born only in this decade, Filipino food may be just a blurred memory as the dining table has been inundated with foreign influences, from MSG instead of rock salt, and kimchi instead of atchara.

This is why we need to remind ourselves what Filipino flavors are all about. It is especially crucial to let children taste sinigang, adobo and paksiw before these flavors are totally forgotten. While we advocate for continuous consumption of local fruits like santol, mabolo, atis, caimito and chico so they may not disappear, we should not forget recipes. Recipes are handed down from one generation to the next using local ingredients like kamias, sampaloc, batuan and sua for sinigang. Regional recipes call for the use of turmeric for bringhe in Pampanga, coconut milk and chilies for Bicolano cuisine and burnt coconut and other spices called palapa for Sulu or Tausug cuisine.

It is the hope of PCHM to continue the celebration with younger chefs and cooks, students and even grade school children, who will be our next generation of consumers. With April as Filipino Food Month, we have reason to focus on remembering our kaluto – the local term for recipes. I have recently written about younger chefs who focus their restaurant theme on local ingredients – and perform creative play or twists to recipes that may introduce local ingredients but as a modern Pinoy version. That is such a welcome addition to our list of restaurant choices, which have been mostly Continental and Asian.

Filipino food events must also not forget our pre-colonial ways of preserving meat (itag, kini-ing and luñis) and preserving vegetables through pickling and fermentation (atchara and buro, respectively). I know there will be regional events to focus on locally available ingredients like coconut for southern Luzon and preserved sausages like longganisa which every province, every region has a claim to having the best kind or best recipe for. Lucban, Tuguegarao and Ilocos are just some of the origins of longganisa, with different flavor profiles – different ratios of garlic to meat, a sprinkling of sugar and/or salt or a unique way of sealing the local sausage with bamboo sticks like Pangasinan’s.

Even the lechon or roasted pig has versions from Cebu compared to those served in Manila. Adobo has versions called puti, classic and tuyô (dried) which chef Claude Tayag has a book on – all kinds of adobo depending on spices used.

You will find history in our cooking as many dishes did not need refrigeration – paksiw and adobo, because these were created when refrigeration was not yet available. That must have been the Spanish time, before the Americans came with refrigerators.

Our sinigang, tinola and nilaga were one-pot meals with meat and vegetables served for big families. Drying fish is a way to preserve the bounty of the sea. Thus we have all kinds of dried fish, again needing no refrigeration.

Filipino food will not be complete without our famous desserts like kakanins, made with rice and coconut in various permutations. Our way of cooking bibingka is also a response to the old way of “baking” as ovens had not yet been invented then. It is also again made of rice flour and not wheat, which we do not grow and must be imported.

This April, think about the food served on your family table and give a thought to why the recipes are such. Was it pre-colonial, or influenced by Spanish or American occupations?

Filipino food is a melange of influences – and you are a collaborator in shaping our food culture with what recipes you choose to serve in your home. They say a people with no culture is a people without a soul. So let us enrich our already checkered food heritage with our continuous choice of local ingredients and let us bring back those recipes our forefathers (and grandmothers) passed on to our parents.

Check out the schedules of talks, markets, celebrations in and around the country this month. Filipino Food Month will be a month-long fiesta around the country. Check the hashtag #PreserveFilipinoFood in social media and you will be led to the very colorful calendar of events.

Give it a thought. Whenever you eat a home-cooked Filipino meal, you actually are giving homage to our rich heritage. And it goes on this month and hopefully, for many more months and years to come.