Filipino Food Month 2026

April is now known as Filipino Food Month (FFM) and though we should be celebrating it everyday, a special month centered on local cuisine helps wake people up from dismissing Filipino food as ordinary food, but looking at local ingredients in a different way.

There is a slew of Facebook pages dedicated to the research, formal or informal, on local food ingredients. It has been trending even in special awards coveted for the hospitality industry to celebrate local ingredients, albeit sometimes overdone by not a few cooks or chefs. Edible flowers, for example, now appear in almost every dish and I almost always remove them. At first it is cute and exciting to see pretty flowers on a salad, but not on every salad, every soup, every dish. Is it then a fad or a trend to use flowers?

I recently interviewed three food writers for my podcast – Ige Ramos, Felice Sta. Maria and Nancy Reyes Lumen. I asked Ige and Felice about food history and how they got interested in research about Filipino food. Nancy shared how their Lola, who started Aristocrat, taught her grandchildren how to cook her recipes.

Ige actually worked the floor in museums when he was younger. This exposed him to many things about culture as well as to scholars and anthropologists. And this is the first lesson: dig deep. Research is not Google or ChatGPT but going to the source of the ingredient itself. Ige loves to travel to distant places, with the keen eye of an anthropologist. Unwritten books on etiquette demand that you get permission to publish quotes from respondents, similar to today’s Data Privacy Act. It is about informed consent of your respondent when they tell stories about their food culture.

Second lesson from Ige is the quote and advice from famous food writer Doreen Gamboa-Fernandez: “Do not expect to be fed” by your respondents. You pay your way each time, and asking for a freebie is a big no-no, especially when sampling food. In these days of Facebook and Instagram features, inexperienced writers ask for free food to be featured in their blog with no second thoughts about it.

For Nancy, a third generation descendant of Doña Engracia “Asiang” Reyes who started the hundred-year-old Aristocrat restaurant, it is about preserving family recipes. Every family has an adobo and sinigang recipe. She and her cousins took lessons from the matriarch herself and to this day, they cook with the preferred ingredients of her Lola Asiang. But like Ige, she says Filipino food must not be defined. It can be innovated but cannot be standardized. An adobo is everybody’s adobo.

Nancy scoffs at new writers who want to define what Filipino food is. To put Filipino food in confinement is a mistake, she says. You must be able to innovate and create your own version while being mindful of your family’s heritage recipes. One is to preserve recipes ala Lola while another thought is adjusting to what is available to you. For example, souring ingredients can be kamias, santol, catmon, sampalok, kamatis, calamansi, sua, batuan and any sour fruit you find in your backyard. Adobo, meantime can be with turmeric, without soy sauce, with a favorite soy sauce brand, with vinegar from palm, rice or coconut.

Any recipe can be tweaked as long as the cook or chef comes up with a dish worthy of repeating and is pleasing to the palate. This is why we do not even want to confine recipes to certain provinces. You can no longer say that bringhe is Pampango and kulawo is Bicol. People travel, intermarry between and among regions and you may now find a Café Laguna in Cebu, preparing Laguna specialties. We can no longer put boundaries on place and origin of recipes and ingredients. I can now grow batuan and make kadyos baboy langka (a famous Ilonggo fare) in the comforts of my home. Batuan (the sour fruit) is now used in cordials, iced tea and other concoctions other than Ilonggo dishes.

Felice shared her love for the study of pre-colonial food history which brings us back to how our ancestors ate before the colonizers came. We ate healthy – grilling, steaming and boiling. Then the Spaniards came with rich dishes and olive oil. The Americans brought everything convenient like canned goods, the refrigerator and instant coffee. This is why recipes now are richer and more complex, and far from the basic it started out as.

A recipe book these days then is a mere guide for a starting cook unfamiliar with our ingredients, or a cook wanting some templates, but it is not gospel. Feel free to innovate, and discover how else to use what ingredient you come across. In these days when foraging and hiking in forests expose us to wild fruits and herbs, go ahead and discover new ingredients. Find out what is in season and use these for your own innovations.

Filipino Food Month is about exposing yourself to new ideas about old recipes. A new version of adobo using turmeric or a sinigang using watermelon is now acceptable. So let us not put stiff rules on our cooking. Let us not close our minds to new versions of what we used to know as the standard. But open our hearts and minds to a new era of Filipino food.

What we can do this month of April is to try new dishes prepared by chefs who want to show our ingredients in a different way. It is not your Lola’s adobo anymore. Let’s be open and try ingredients we never knew about – sampinit, lipote, catmon, to name a few. Over the years we made people try different salts which are now mainstream. Different rice and grains like adlai and millet. We also now see takway, sinantolan and tinolang pili (soaked in Bicol patis).

Filipino food has no boundaries. Let us not punish innovators by correcting their innovations and putting them in boxes.

Let us celebrate Filipino ingredients, because it is what can feed our stomachs and, most especially, our soul.