Preserving culture for the future

Wherever we went, our kitchen reflected our changes, with a mixture of flavors from here and there.

This was the first time I had ever seen Filipino food or Filipino anything in print.

What we eat and how we eat reflects our individual histories and also something wider and collective.

[Ask yourself,] 'What are the sides of my identity that I've been hiding from or don't want to look at?'

You can pick one strand of a food and find an entire history embedded into it.

Culture isn't static. Culture changes. We all knows this, but the question is, 'Who also gets to decide what is tradition or not?'

The stories that we hear or the stories that others tell about us can have the power to harm us or have the power to heal us.

Is there a way that our foods can actually be part of this healing?

Worry less about authenticity and more about, 'Is this food good? Where is it going to take us next?'

In choosing food [...] it's really about recovering tradition, it's about changing painful narratives of loss and erasure into something that can be healing and restorative.

Culture is not something you can put away on a shelf or try to freeze in time. It's about having a muscle memory, practicing it, and bringing it back into the world. Something you keep alive so that you're able to pass it on to the next generation.

You have to be okay with looking at tradition in the eye and sometimes bending it to where you are and when you are.

There are things that we love, but don't always love us back. What do you do with that?

Can you recover the things that you were supposed to forget?