OUR good friend, the historian, Indonesian/Southeast Asian scholar and Jakarta-based educator Prof. Ferdinand Victoria, was in town for vacation during the Christmas season. University of the Philippines-Diliman historian Vicente Villan and I met with him on Dec. 28, 2025, catching up while shamelessly occupying a table at a membership-only retail warehouse club chain in a Quezon City mall for more than eight hours.
Talk eventually veered toward book and other academic projects because Villan serves as the tireless adviser of the ambitious, determined and unapologetically listo New Era University Center for Philippine Studies (NEU-CPS). “Ambitious” is not necessarily a dirty word. Rather, it signifies an unambiguous and unified scholarly agenda vital to the advance of intellectualism.
Through Villan’s prodding, Victoria and I (then based in Changwon, South Korea) became a staple of NEU-CPS webinars during the Covid-19 pandemic. We eventually became friends with NEU-CPS director Br. Zaldy Petorio, Princess Fame Pascua, the research coordinator of NEU-CPS, among other scholars. Victoria, Villan and I (as was fellow Manila Times columnist Xiao Chua) were among the contributors for the inaugural volume of “Kaningningan: An Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Journal of New Era University Center for Philippine Studies” which came out in 2022. During the meetup, we committed to write an article each for an upcoming book project that Villan is going to edit for the NEU-CPS.
We talked about other topics of conversation, including the Department of Trade and Industry’s claim that P500 was enough for a noche buena feast consisting of, among other things, spaghetti and macaroni salad. From there, our discussion briefly delved into food history and culture in the country, which Villan — always in character — wants as a theme for a future issue of the “Kaningningan” journal.
Villan wanted me to develop a social media post I wrote in connection with the Pinoy spaghetti issue, a dish described by Kawaling Pinoy dot com as “made of ground beef, hot dogs, sweet-style sauce and banana catsup.” I was reacting to the ludicrous suggestion of a social media personality that Pinoy spaghetti is “tied to outdated colonial habits.” Moreover, I found nauseatingly dim-witted the suggestion by the same social media personality that instead of Pinoy spaghetti, Filipino households should instead celebrate noche buena with — drumroll, please — “adobo” and “tinola.” Pinoy spaghetti emerged as a dish that captures the Filipinos’ unrepentant and unequivocal sweet tooth. In most fast-food chains in the country, however, Pinoy spaghetti — together with fried chicken and french fries — became the food of choice among Filipino children. I learned this firsthand when I offered to treat my young niece to a meal in the country’s leading fast-food restaurant when I went to San Jose, Antique, for a visit some years ago. At the restaurant, all she wanted to eat was Pinoy spaghetti. I tried to cajole her to order other food in the menu but Pinoy spaghetti was the only thing she wanted. She was about 10 years old at the time.
If you remove Pinoy spaghetti from the noche buena feast, what, then, will the children eat?
Not convinced? I enjoin everyone to conduct a basic social experiment just for fun: scan any typical fast-food outlet in the country and note how many of the children, say, below the age of 12, are eating Pinoy spaghetti.
Always quick on his feet, Villan insisted that Pinoy spaghetti is an example of transculturality. Christina Richter-Ibañez elaborated that “the concept of ‘transculturality’ draws attention to the fact that cultures are networked, blended and mobile structures through which changes pass.”
I suspect that sweet is the primary taste for Filipinos; we simply balance it with salty, sour and bitter, as we have done in Pinoy spaghetti.
By the way, cane sugar is not the only source of sweet flavor in our dishes. Do not be surprised that many Filipino dishes use vinegar derivatives (“langgaw”) from coconut wine (“tuba”). Coconut Community dot org explains that “the main ingredient of the fermented (coconut) sap is sucrose and there is very little reducing sugar, although other sugars like glucose, fructose, maltose and raffinose are present.” Tuba offers nutrients like B vitamins, calcium, potassium, magnesium and amino acids “acting as a low-calorie, energy-boosting drink with potential digestive aid from probiotics in its fermented form... [and] its vinegar derivative supports heart and gut health.”
To balance, we voraciously consume a staple in Filipino — and Southeast Asian (Prof. Victoria quickly added) —- dishes: gata, which is rich in medium-chain triglycerides, or MCTs, and contains fiber, that helps slow down digestion and prevents rapid spikes in blood sugar after a meal.
Fray Francisco Colin, SJ. wrote about the Filipino diet in this way in the 17th century:
“Their (i.e., the Filipinos usual sustenance is... rice, well-hulled and cleaned, and boiled only with water... The meat is that of a small fish which is lacking in no part. That is also boiled in water, and with the broth from it, they give a flavor [to the rice]... For lack of rice and fish, they use the herbs and many kinds of native potatoes (i.e., kamote) and fruits, by which they are sustained well enough. At their banquets they add venison, pork or beef, which they like best when it has begun to spoil and to smell bad (i.e., fermented meat)...
They relish salt, and salty and acid foods. They have no better dainty for the sick than vinegar and green or pickled fruits...”
Filipinos, historically, ate healthy food before colonialism ruined our diet.
If I could clone myself, Van Ybiernas II would be an avid food historian. I dislike that some tend to pass off trivia as food history these days.
The history of food (or any topic for that matter) is not to be approached by peppering it with trivial information. History exists to produce knowledge that gives us an insight into our identity as a nation. That can only be achieved by piecing bits of information about the past together to form a narrative that helps explain and sheds light on our present circumstances.