As the holidays come to a close and as the proverbial lechon is turned into the proverbial paksiw, it’s time to reckon with the timeless question

Is Filipino food unhealthy?

It’s easy to think so, given how it’s popularly served. Even the foreign branches of Filipino and other food chains and brands come with vegetable dishes.

While our food is gaining more recognition internationally, it’s admittedly the food commonly served at fiestas and special occasions: rich, savory, flavored, and based on red meat and highly processed.

The unhealthiness of Filipino food has become an internet meme at this point. But we have reasons to believe it’s just that.

(Un)changing times

There’s a hidden gem tucked away along Xavierville Avenue, Quezon City. It’s been around for some time now. I’ve been going for more than a decade. A more senior writer actually covered it way, way back: I bumped into her once while dining in, and she raved like the place just opened yesterday.

Blissful Belly, owned by Omar Arabia, MD, puts a vegan spin on the Filipino carinderia, offering staples like nilaga, pancit, kare-kare (complete with vegan bagoong!), okoy, lumpia, and more, all displayed in a turo-turo setup as his staff prepare plates of red rice and glasses of tamarind, dalandan, and more juices.

Behind the restaurant, inside Arabia’s office, I remember seeing a broadsheet clipping, framed, browned on the edges (this was in 2015, mind you) but with the text still clear, that described how Filipino non-communicable (“lifestyle”) diseases were on the rise while diseases like polio and cholera, which are less influenced by diet and lifestyle and treated by modern vaccines, have been steadily on the downtrend.

While our food is gaining more recognition internationally, it’s admittedly the food commonly served at fiestas and special occasions: rich, savory, flavored, and based on red meat and highly processed

The article concluded that aspirational dining, eating more “fiesta food” during more days of the year, instead of the traditional diet of fish and vegetables, was influencing a rising trend in high blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes among Filipinos, enamored as we are by the growing ubiquity both Spanish-era fiesta food and American fast food.

Clearly, Dr. Arabia, whose treatments also include lifestyle and mindset changes aside from pharmaceutical cures, had reasons for keeping that perennial, if dog-eared, story.

On one hand, that old article could argue that Filipino food in recent years, rather, the food more Filipinos prefer to consume in recent years has become unhealthy.

On the other hand, that same article could argue that traditional Filipino food is healthy.

Doreen Fernandez, for one, agrees with both readings above. In “Ang Mahiwagang Nilaga,” a 1991 essay of hers republished in a recent anthology, the professor, historian, and degustadora writes “Filipino cooking has, at its base, a simplicity of method that comes from earth wisdom,” referencing the “agricultural cycle that we live by (compare it to the industrial cycle.”

She continues: “Our Indigenous cuisine is very often grilled, steamed, and boiled,” cooking methods that doctors largely agree are the healthiest among others. “Only much later did we learn to sauté, fry, and bake,” she concludes, noting how the latter methods were imported from contact with foreigners including through colonization.

It’s interconnected

Another post by citizen-scientist and social media personality Lokalpedia (John Sherwin Felix) seems to align with Fernandez’s observation. After reading historian E. Alexander Orquiza Jr’s “Taste of Control: Food and the Filipino Colonial Mentality Under American Rule” (2020), the blogger was moved to write:

“One thing I’ve learned from this is how our colonizers vilified our traditional food systems. They propagated the idea that our food was unhygienic, non-nutritious, and backward—a “damsel in distress” that needed saving. They did this to assert control, making us believe we needed them to “improve” our way of life.

While the colonizers are long gone, the effects of their propaganda remain. And colonization continues today, albeit in different forms, through the dominance of corporate food systems over our local ones.”

I scrolled through some comments (maybe next time, we can all talk about how quality content creators bring together quality conversations and a quality community) and remembered my own childhood as an aging millennial where the first half of my life was in the analog era all as the current chunk of life tries to navigate the digital era.

I also recalled, thanks to Lokalpedia and the netizens drawn to it, that popular snacks in the late 1990s and early 2000s such as plantains, root crops, and cold dessert stews like bilu-bilo have largely been replaced by fast food-analogous snacks and soda

Lokalpedia recently stirred conversation anew for a series of posts critiquing a popular fast food giant (and the bigger phenomenon of the corporate takeover of small, local businesses) and how it seems to have skewed notions of progress and development.

Aside from dial-up internet, landlines, playing on the street, yellow pages, cassette tapes, and VCD players, the ubiquity (versus today’s atomization) of pop culture interests, I also recalled, thanks to Lokalpedia and the netizens drawn to it, that popular snacks in the late 1990s and early 2000s such as plantains, root crops, and cold dessert stews like bilu-bilo have largely been replaced by fast food-analogous snacks and soda.

I asked around: Friends, co-workers, and family also recalled local fruits (sineguelas, binukaw, katmon, etc.), food preparation methods (Bicol Express the Bikol way, inabraw, pakbet, without pork), and snacks from their hometowns and childhood, which seem to be disappearing today.

So is Filipino food really unhealthy?

This seems to ultimately be not just a lifestyle but also a political question. What market forces and power brokers and vested interests are using their amassed capital to influence consumer preferences? Why does the burden of guilt fall on you, dear reader, enjoying another helping of lechon (minsan lang talaga ‘to!), and not the institutionalized greed attempting to control our consumption habits?