#CulturePH - Your Lola Knew What She Was Doing: Filipino Food Is a Fine Art — and We're Only Just Catching Up
You probably have a memory like this: a holiday table, a bilao piled high with puto and kutsinta, arranged just so — colours alternating in a way that felt deliberate, almost intentional. And maybe you never stopped to think about it, because it was just food. It was just what your tita did. But here's what nobody told you then: that arrangement was art. Quietly, intently, art.
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April is Filipino Food Month, and while most of the attention will go to restaurant pop-ups and food fair lineups (as it should, eat everything), the Cultural Center of the Philippines' Encyclopedia of Philippine Art has been doing something quieter and arguably more important: documenting Filipino cuisine not just as food, but as one of the country's living art forms. And the deeper you go into what they've compiled, the harder it becomes to ever look at a pastillas wrapper the same way again.
Let's start there — with
pastillas de leche from San Miguel de Mayumo in Bulacan, because it's one of
the most stunning examples of craft hiding in plain sight. The candy itself is
simple: carabao milk, sugar, rolled into soft little logs. But the wrapping —
the pabalat — is anything but simple. Artists like Luz Mendoza Ocampo design
their own patterns, trace them onto layers of papel de Japon (that thin, almost
translucent coloured paper), and cut them out using a cuticle scissor. Flowers,
birds, the Maria Clara motif, the nipa hut. Some artists skip the tracing
entirely and cut freehand, folding and snipping with the kind of muscle memory
that takes years to develop. The candy is eaten in seconds. The wrapper, if
you're paying attention, is a whole other experience.
This is the thing about Filipino food artistry that tends to get overlooked in broader conversations about our cuisine: so much of it lives in the periphery of the eating. It's in the packaging, the presentation, the preparation ritual. Suman sa ibus isn't just sticky rice — it's pale young coconut fronds woven with a specific technique, a craft so regional that in Obando, Bulacan, they use darker fronds woven into small triangular baskets. Puso, the 'hanging rice' of Cebu and Cagayan de Oro, comes encased in woven coconut leaves shaped into portable pouches. The food travels well. The craft travels with it.
There's a particular kind of
intelligence embedded in food art that's easy to miss if you're only thinking
about aesthetics. Achara — the pickled relish made from grated unripe papaya,
bell peppers, and cucumber — works as a canvas precisely because its textures
and colours are suited for carving. Someone, at some point, looked at a jar of
pickles and thought: I can turn this into a scene. And they did. In some
provinces, creativity shows up differently: in Laguna, they stuff dayap limes
with coconut jelly, adding textural contrast that is both playful and precise.
Meanwhile, in San Miguel de Mayumo, the Pampango tradition of mayumo involves
preserving fruits like pomelo, wax gourd, and lime — carving decorative
patterns into the skin before jarring them. These aren't decorations added to
food. The food IS the decoration.
It's worth sitting with the
fact that much of this artistry is gendered, localised, and historically
underdocumented. The pabalat tradition in Bulacan is largely practised by
women. The cookie-mold traditions in Bago City, Negros Occidental trace back to
migrant families from Panay who settled there in the 1920s, pressing rice flour
and sugar into wooden molds etched with USAFFE insignias and Boy Scout logos
alongside flowers — a compressed social history in every cookie. In Pampanga,
feast day cookies shaped after San Nicolas's iconography are sold outside
churches. You can read an entire community's migration patterns, religious
life, and material culture through the shapes they press into dough.
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The CCP EPA has spent decades being the institution that takes this seriously. Researched by over 500 scholars from the country's top universities, the latest edition runs to more than 5,000 articles across 12 volumes — with the digital edition (CCP EPAD) housing over 6,000 entries and hundreds of video excerpts. Since the first print edition in 1994, the EPA has been in the business of saying: this matters, this deserves documentation, this is part of who we are. The food art entries are a reminder that cultural preservation isn't only about the grand and the monumental. Sometimes it's about recording the way a woman in Bulacan folds a candy wrapper.
For working professionals
navigating a world that moves very fast and values productivity in very visible
ways, there's something genuinely worth pausing on here. Filipino food artistry
is, at its core, an argument for the value of slow craft — for the idea that
the effort you put into how something is presented is not vanity, it's care.
Every fluted empanada edge in Silay, every pinched pattern on a Vigan panara,
every bilao arrangement is someone saying: I want this to be worth your full
attention. Not just your appetite.
That bakery in Antipolo that
makes bread shaped like lobsters, pigs, turtles, and crocodiles? That's not a
novelty. That's a baker who decided the world could use more delight, and then
spent the time to make it. We could all stand to do a little more of that —
whatever our medium.
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