Food has always been my family’s language of love—rooted in shared meals, quiet rituals, and memories in the kitchen. Through my parents, I learned that food is more than nourishment; it holds care, gratitude, and togetherness.
Last November 15, I attended a food writing workshop led by Kaye Leah Sitchon, an award-winning food writer who was tied for 3rd Place in the 2022 Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Food Writing Award and had previously won first prize in the same award in 2020—one of the Philippines’ most prestigious honors for food literature.
The workshop was part of the Ibagiw Creative Festival this year. During the workshop, we were asked to answer the following for the first write-up:
“What is your story?”
“Who or what shaped your relationship with food or your philosophy or belief about food?”
I reflected, reminisced, and then something hit me. I wrote this:
“Mangan tayon.”
“Anak, fix the table na,” these were the sentences my parents called out to me and my sister when we were kids.
My sister, Charisse, and I were dependent on my dad to give, as he is what we called a “cooking master boy” to us. Cooking Master Boy was a famous anime TV show on AXN where the protagonist, Liang Yang, joins cooking shows. Our dad, like him, knows almost every ingredient that was cooked in every dish.
Remembering my late parents this way reminds me that my relationship with food is also like the relationship in our family. It is such a ceremonial practice to eat together as a family. My mama used to call us out, “kain na tayo sa hapag-kainan,” meaning “dining table,” with the Lazy Susan carrying the weight of the dishes.
My love for food is always rooted in the following:
My dad’s knife skills—when he’s chopping the ingredients, pounding the garlic, mincing the onions, chopping the carrots so thin, the raw chicken as he cuts a groove through the bones. The way he cleans up the fish he buys from the market. As he cooks, I always see him tasting the sabaw or sarsa of the dish and the way he nods in the air, conveying “masarap,” “okay na.”
I believe that eating is also a form of “relief.” A good one, because I know much now that it takes hard work to put something on the table, to feed a family. My mom would say at our birthday celebrations, “Thank you, Lord, nairaos din,” because serving food—cooking, serving, and taking long hours of hard work—requires having a budget to buy ingredients and knowing how to cook them.
My first love wasn’t cooking. If I were to choose, the first thing I learned to make in the kitchen was baking. I was influenced by my late mom. I used to assist her in the kitchen when she baked a cake for our birthdays or when she baked Food for the Gods, icing the cake, etc. I learned to really follow her recipes, and if I remember perfectly well, I first learned how to bake coco macaroons by myself, and I even sold them at the front of our house.
As I am now older, I realized that food is not just nourishment to “survive.” Because of the memories where food is involved, it’s an anchor to relationships with our loved ones that celebrates the meaning of togetherness and God’s grace. Food is a form of love, and my love for food was nurtured in me by the unconditional love of my parents.
