For a brief moment, it felt a little jarring to hear Erwan Heusaff explaining about sisig and fried tilapia with buro and mustasa to an American foodie on a gourmand’s tour of Manila.

Sure, Erwan is a social media content creator of merit, building his fame as The Fat Kid Inside with his vlogs about crave-inducing dishes. But the English spoken so flawlessly did not at first sound authentic for the subject. See-sug versus see-seeg still tastes the same, however, anywhere in the Philippines coming from its home in Pampanga. Or certainly rolling off the tongue of a guy who is half French but with a full Filipino heart.

Yes, that info-taining episode featuring Manila on Somebody Feed Phil, now on a popular streaming site’s season eight, was not just an eye-opener but a soul nudge.

If Heusaff, a James Beard awardee, can spout such knowledgeable tidbits about the Philippines’ culinary offerings and declare his total love for the cuisine, we should all be chewing on whether we can say the same for ourselves. What is Filipino unity without pride, and such pride without substance?

You can’t just shove a balut into a foreigner’s hand and cackle with mirth if you don’t fully appreciate that this duck embryo delicacy was hatched in China and localized after traders brought it here. Therefore, it is “healthful” to start knowing that dishes we call Filipino probably came from foreign influences because that does not make them any less Pinoy.

As Phil said in his Food of the World series, Filipino food has so many influences, but remains “so unique.”

When we wonder which province or whose mom makes the best adobo, it’s mostly a moot exercise because we will gobble up the dish anyway and appreciate how it tastes familiar and therefore comforting. Like a warm hug in an indifferent world, a lullaby instead of car horns, and rest amid stress. Sinigang, lechon, kinilaw and nilaga are as much reflections of our preference for multiple tastes as they are of our diversity.

They say Filipino cuisine is having a moment on the international scene. We feel the pride, we feel the joy — and at the same time the despair that such a moment should finally come when the world seems on fire.

We have loved our own cuisine since forever, but it’s only now it seems that we are showing some pride in it. It had to take the likes of Anthony Bourdain to wow us about our fiesta main fare, the lechon or roasted pig, or the jolly Phil Rosenthal to get us curious about the four-decades-old Trellis and Aling Sosing’s hearty sidewalk fare.

Did it have to take 300 years for us to be rid of our self-deprecatory mindset, mistaking servitude for humility and finally accepting that we are worthy of the best, too?

Even now, when we hear of public officials shameless in their flaunting of and giddy with unchecked power, we just shrug off the distaste, convincing ourselves that it’s sweeter to keep the peace. It’s why we can endure long lines, the perennial traffic, and a government that is caving in on itself.

Yet if the current world wars should tell us anything other than that the egos of leaders do not equate to a people’s pride, it is that we, Filipinos, can take pride in many things about our culture — and it is high time that we did.

We should not be rejoicing that much on social media over a foreign-produced episode on our culture — we should be the living proof of the beauty of our culture that we build whole showcases of in other countries like Japan. Because if we continue to believe that we are not worthy, the change we seek will never be fully realized.

So here’s Erwan again, in a recent post, not on sizzling sisig or steaming hot tilapia, but a bitter reality: “Don’t get me wrong, I love the Philippines. But every time I visit other Asian countries, it stings a little seeing how far ahead they are in terms of public transport, infrastructure, green spaces and just… basic systems that work. It’s not about comparing. It’s the quiet grief of knowing we deserve better, too.”