Filipino Food Month 2025

It has been seven years since the celebration of Filipino Food month started. And you may ask: why celebrate something so ordinary or so everyday? Well, people have forgotten our local recipes as they are eclipsed by international food trends. And the Pinoy being a “sponge,” many children and youth do not even know what sinampalukan means anymore.

Or recipes from grandmothers who put love and passion in their cooking, like my mother who would have cauldrons of meat stewing for hours in our wood-fired stove. She would start with a live chicken, bleed it for iron-rich blood, drop the pieces of coagulated blood with uncooked rice in the soup and get sampalok (tamarind) leaves from our backyard. Our ancestral home had many fruit trees in the backyard – kamias, santol, balimbing as our father loved sourcing ingredients and our mom was a great home cook.

We grew up having a fresh buko or coconut from the backyard for dessert or juice, taking care of chickens for fresh eggs and getting leaves of siling labuyo, malunggay leaves and young papaya for tinola and other dishes. That is a feat not so easy to do now, when people live in high rises and a lot of convenience food includes ready-made mixes.

I look back at how Mom used to prepare for days for a Sunday lunch for the brood. She would boil meat, stew beef for days and had her regular purveyors for each food ingredient – usually for meat and seafood. The other ingredients could be picked from our own backyard in the growing city of then Caloocan, Rizal. Malabon and Navotas were the next towns, as well as nearby province of Bulacan where she bought molasses, duck eggs and our favorite rice cakes (putong pulo).

Our experience in eating fresh local recipes while growing up makes me relate to the celebration of Filipino Food Month. And I wish many homes will celebrate April’s event by cooking more food at home, at least for April. Or trying recipes from yesteryears, shared by old aunts and grandmothers. These are usually never documented, and recipes are passed on by story-telling or handed down with a bit of change, when ingredients are no longer available at the local market or supermarket. Souring ingredients become instant mixes, and so the recipes get altered along the way, for convenience and practical reasons.

What makes me happy is that the Philippine Culinary Heritage Movement (PCHM) has been relentlessly promoting the celebration year after year along with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and the Department of Agriculture’s AMAS. Special mention to Ning Carlos who was also with us in Slow Food Turin in 2018, and knows of our common passion for Filipino food preservation.

Ning met us again at the launch of Filipino Food Month and even gave us seeds that are open-pollinated varieties (OPV) of tomatoes, ampalaya and other local vegetables. I was surprised many already seasoned cooks did not know there is a difference between OPV seeds and hybrid ones. Thanks to DA-AMAS, the OPV seeds will keep producing fruit as we can plant their seeds again. Like how it used to be, before the advent of hybridization and modern seed production. Try and get OPV seeds whenever you can. I am witness to how local native varieties produce good seeds that we replant again and again. For the last 10 years that is what we have been using at the farm.

The PCHM also promotes heirloom ingredients as we do in Slow Food (www.slowfood.com) and we are happy to see popular brands of convenience foods now promoting local cacao and heirloom rice like tinawon for a champorado mix. Because of the joint efforts among the three groups (DA, NCCA and PCHM), we have been seeing the rise or the comeback of heirloom rice as well as the ancient grain called adlai in the menus of younger chefs. These were popularized by the late chef Margarita Fores and Spanish chef Chele, by including adlai in their restaurant menus. We have also seen the rise in use of fragrant grasses like pandan and lemongrass in recipes and even in cocktail drinks.

In the new restaurants I have recently visited, the chefs now proudly use etag (preserved smoked pork from the Cordillera), turmeric or luyang dilaw, guyabano or soursop in sauces and local artisanal salt (tultul, buy-o and miag-ao, among others). Good job, guys!

Besides heirloom ingredients, we need to promote and patronize restaurants that serve local recipes, the way we knew them from years back. We cannot however, modify each recipe and make it “modern” Filipino, as we may lose its original intended flavor notes and we may dilute its heritage in the process. Personally, I enjoy eating adobo that tastes like my Mom’s adobo, her sinigang and even paksiw. I am looking for this kind of restaurant that promotes their family recipes, in the hope I might find something closer to my memory of Mama’s cooking.

This April, I will be on the lookout for such restaurants that preserve the local original flavor of standards like pinakbet, adobo and sinigang. This month, let us focus on our Filipino food recipes from our elders, check out restaurants that offer similar original dishes, or cook at home. If you can get a copy of Kayumanggi, a cookbook penned by chef Jam Melchor and printed by the DTI, do so.

Best of all, it is our consciousness about Filipino food – the way we remember from childhood like I do, or interpreted by new chefs and home cooks – that is what matters. That we do not forget how we were first exposed to local recipes and that we keep cooking them to let the next generations keep the purity and identity of what Filipino food is.

They say a people without culture is a people without soul. Let us not lose our culture. Do it by eating Filipino food and keeping the original recipes.