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I would never dare tell anyone who cooked for me that I didn’t like their food. Growing up in a Filipino household had taught me that food = love. Instead of asking, “How are you?,” my parents would ask me, “Have you eaten?” In my family, it was our way of connecting across generational and cultural differences, so I always finished my plate even when the meal wasn’t my cup of tea.
Dinner time was a sacred time for my family. During the weekdays, my parents worked long hours, getting up early before I’d wake to commute into New York City and come home in the evening around 7:45 p.m. Most days I wouldn’t see them until dinner time. When I’d hear my mom's keys jingle at the door and my dad’s car pulling up into the driveway, my siblings and I would flock to the table. My nanny, who was more like a second mother to us, cooked our family’s meals, which included a weekly rotation of pork or chicken adobo, salmon sinigang, and bistek. We’d scoop mountains of rice and protein onto our plates and talk about what we did at school. At an early age, I connected food with being together with loved ones.
There was also the immigrant guilt of wasting food. As many kids of immigrant parents know, not finishing your plate was almost blasphemous. My parents would bring up how people in their home country often didn’t have any food, and I should be grateful to have a full plate. There's even a Filipino superstition that the rice you’ve left behind on your plate will be waiting for you in the afterlife, where you’ll be forced to pick up every single grain one by one. That imagery haunted me as a kid, so during most meals, my plate would be completely cleaned off. And as I grew up, it became a habit that was hard to break.