As a chef who has spent years learning how food connects people to memory and identity, I have come to see comfort food as a form of storytelling — simple, honest, and rooted in culture. My first lesson came from my grandmother’s hands. She was a schoolteacher, married to a soldier, and had eight children. Her dishes were simple, born of frugality and practicality. She told stories of childhood scarcity, of harvests gleaned from backyard gardens, of celebrations stitched into the seams of ordinary days.
Among all these memories, one dish stands above the rest in my heart: pinakbet. I first learned it from my grandmother in Baguio, where the cool mountain air sharpened the taste of fresh vegetables and tomatoes. My mother perfected the dish over Sunday lunches in Antipolo. She did not use a recipe; instead, she worked in ratios — a kilo of eggplant and a kilo of tomatoes to half a kilo of ampalaya. Small, thin eggplants; tiny, wrinkled ampalaya; and vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes were preferred. Other seasonal vegetables made their way into the pot: patani, squash, samsamping, alukon, katuray, malunggay pods, and long green chiles. A cup of bagoong, bagnet for flavor, all sautéed and then simmered together. The vegetables were added last, the pot covered and left alone — no stirring allowed — until everything was nakibet, Ilocano for shrunk or wilted. Only then was the pot opened, stirred, and tasted. My mother finished her pinakbet with a bit of sampalok to round out the flavors.
Every time I eat pinakbet, I am transported back to those happy Sunday afternoons, gathered around the wooden table my father made, laughter spilling as abundantly as the vegetables in that steaming bowl.
Comfort food carries the weight of history and the lightness of hope. It is culture in a bowl. And in the midst of disasters and distress, it is what our souls need.
When I cook for victims of natural and man-made disasters with my friends from Art Relief Mobile Kitchen, we plan menus appropriate to the communities where we set up field kitchens. Pinakbet in Tuguegarao for the victims of Typhoon Ulysses. Binakol in Negros when Mt. Kanlaon erupted. Pastil in Marawi during the siege. And arroz caldo everywhere. After a flood, typhoon, or fire, a hot bowlful of it can transform both mood and mindset. I have seen grief soften in the warmth of a bowl of lugaw.
In an era of instant gratification and assembly-line cuisine, comfort food insists on slowness. This labor is not sacrifice; it is devotion. To serve comfort food is to offer shelter. When I plate a simple bowl of pinakbet and rice, I am not merely feeding hunger — I am stitching together fragments of belonging for anyone who sits before me. I have witnessed strangers shed tears at the first taste of familiar flavors long absent from their lives. I have watched laughter bloom over shared plates, bridging language and distance.
But comfort food is also resistance. It resists the erasure of place, the flattening of taste into global and corporate uniformity. Each recipe carried across oceans becomes a manifesto: Here we are. We remember. We survive. In migrant kitchens from London to Los Angeles, from Melbourne to Dubai, the scent of garlic, ginger, and dried fish becomes proof that home can be rebuilt anywhere.
There is no hierarchy in comfort food. It can be as humble as a bowl of arroz caldo or as celebratory as a feast of lechonand caldereta. Its power lies not in extravagance but in authenticity — in recipes passed down orally, in handwritten cards splattered with oil and tears, in family gatherings where everyone eats with their hands and their hearts.
To cook comfort food is to honor lineage and propagate future memory. The act of cooking becomes an offering — to ancestors who taught us, to communities that raised us, and to strangers who will one day claim these flavors as their own. It is a testament to resilience, a reminder that in the face of upheaval and loss, we can create nourishment that transcends hunger.
Comfort food teaches us that food is not only sustenance but solidarity. It reminds us that cultural identity is not static but evolving, shaped by the flavors we create and the stories we tell while stirring the pot. Food becomes a language that can challenge power, rebuild community, and honor those whose stories risk being forgotten.
In the quiet cool of my Baguio kitchen, I stir. I season. I remember. And in each spoonful I serve, I share the essential truth: Comfort food is a map back to ourselves, a bridge to each other, and an invitation to taste the stories that make us human.
