Embracing the food that embraces us

One cloudy morning last year, my partner and I met the residents of the Aeta neighborhood who welcomed us to their sacred ancestral land.

After our hike, we were presented with a very simple dish for lunch: a bowl of boiled chicken, its hot broth, and unfamiliar green leaves. The Aetas call this binukaw, derived from the leaves of the binukaw tree (Scientific name: Garcinia binucao) from the forest. The young leaves and its fruits serve as souring agents, like the non-native sampalok used in typical sour Filipino dishes like sinigang. Some communities across the Philippines would use this food ingredient for the same purpose, according to the documentation of Lokalpedia.

Binukaw has only five ingredients: chicken, binukaw leaves, water, a pinch of salt, and black pepper. While it seems simple, the broth is very rich with flavor–just the right mix of savory and sour. A spoonful tastes like a warm embrace. A hot broth paired with a cup of steamed rice perfectly complemented the drizzling weather. How did they know the meal we needed at that moment?

I grew up in the city not knowing anything much about our rich food heritage from different parts of our country. Here, I realized how long I was disconnected from the simple gifts of our own forests, like the heartwarming taste of binukaw.

Perhaps today’s bias on our food heritage is a product of our colonial past. During the Spanish colonial period, large-scale monocultures replaced subsistence agriculture that dominated in our precolonial history. Non-native cash crops were introduced, such as corn, tobacco, tomatoes, and potatoes. That historic shift threatened native food biodiversity toward near-extinction and displaced our traditional foodways that had sustained the Philippines for centuries.

When the American period came, colonial mentality was further embedded in the Filipino foodways by setting Western systems above indigenous foodways, leaving lasting legacies on dietary habits and cultural attitudes toward food. The American colonial government reinforced such cultural superiority through education, policy, and advertisements, shaping how Filipinos ate and how they saw themselves. Everything Western merged at the center-front, while what was native to us was pushed to the periphery.

But it was also the colonial mentality and legacies that sparked resistance among Filipino cuisine practitioners during the colonial period. They did not passively accept the cultural dominance of the West. When it came to food, they responded by adopting, adapting, or even outright rejecting these influences. During these times, Filipino families had selective adaptations that transformed the food into something that is still uniquely Filipino, proving their agency against a system of cultural superiority.

Reflecting from this past, I believe collective agency could hold the key to resolve our alienation with food heritage. Advocacy platforms like Lokalpedia are archiving and promoting food heritage to provide Filipinos the comprehensive knowledge on the overlooked indigenous food items and heirloom food products before we lose them.

Food heritage cannot transform the Philippine food systems toward sustainability alone, but archives of our food diversity can inform how we can pull down food prices, end hunger and malnutrition, empower farmers and food workers, and bring long-term resilience to our local food systems.

With food becoming the nexus issue interlinking various global and local challenges such as disaster vulnerability and rural hunger, it’s about time to be more open to considering our diverse food heritage in our individual food choices. For researchers and the national government, the development of our national food systems dashboard can also consider food heritage data to inform future policy decisions related to food, nutrition, and livelihoods. For local governments and the private sector, measures must be implemented to protect indigenous peoples’ cultural heritage, provide local livelihood support, and ensure their easier access to markets.

I learned from the binukaw that there’s so much more than the food I used to eat.

Access to simple dishes like the binukaw shouldn’t be too complicated. We have the right to receive the embrace that the binukaw soup gave me on that cold, rainy day. I dream of a future where binukaw, and the rest of our hidden gems in Philippine cuisine, would no longer appear “exotic,” “foreign,” and “unnatural.”

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Andre Jacques Tigno, 25, is a sustainability practitioner, climate leader, and nature storyteller based in Quezon City. He is pursuing his graduate studies on sustainability under the Master of Liberal Arts program at Harvard University.