Daily TribuneWhen leaders govern without moral frameworks, without accountability, without even the basic decency of shame, they do not simply steal money. They steal meaning. They steal the story we tell ourselves about who we are.
A nation is often best understood through what it tastes like — layered, complex and deeply intertwined with memory and identity.
Our political landscape has been a cause of reflection for all of us. Culture is who we are as a people, and should be something we can be proudly using as a cause for positive country branding. But our culture has been overridden by such negative political happenings. So, this article is about how food has somehow become symbolic of where we are today.
Long before scholars wrote dissertations on postcolonial identity, Filipinos were already telling their story through food. From the delight at chorizos of our Spanish cuisine heritage, to the embrace of Spam when the Americans came, to the sushi popularity now forgiving of the Japanese period, and the latest Korean BTS cultural craze that drags samgyupsal along with it! But we have the sapin-sapin. This layered rice cake — violet from ube, yellow gold from langka, white from coconut — has always been our most honest self-portrait. Each layer distinct, each layer proud, yet pressed together into one whole, one flavor, one people. To bite into sapin-sapin is to taste the Malay, the Chinese, the Spanish, the American — all the civilizations that washed upon our shores and left something behind. We did not merely absorb these influences. We stacked them, color by color, and called it ours.
Then there is the halo-halo — and with it, a more exuberant metaphor for what it means to be Filipino. Here is a glass overflowing with contradiction and abundance: sweetened beans beside nata de coco, purple yam ice cream melting into shaved ice, leche flan sinking slowly into a riot of textures. Halo-halo does not apologize for its complexity. It celebrates it. To eat halo-halo is to surrender to the beautiful chaos of a nation that has always found ways to make something joyful out of whatever it was given — hardship, history, heat. It is not a refined dessert. It is a democratic one. Every ingredient insists on being seen, and somehow, together, they work.
For decades, halo-halo felt like the right metaphor. Messy, yes. Imperfect, certainly. But rich — rich with layers, rich with flavor, rich with the promise that beneath the ice there was always something worth digging for. Culture and politics reflected this. Doable and acceptable.
But today (it’s almost tragic when I write this), our politico-culture feels less like halo-halo and more like ice scramble — the poor cousin sold in plastic bags outside school gates. Ice scramble is shaved ice dyed a garish pink, dusted with powdered milk if you are lucky, sweet in a hollow, chemical way. There are no beans. No nata. No real fruit. Just color. Just the performance of sweetness, without any of the substance. Gone are our statements, the intellectuals are a majority, the strategists almost gone. The substance of power in our halls of government are all performances with no substance, majority with egos that only see the power and the next election, the money they can make from the position. The sad dwindling minority are left with so much to carry for the people.
But even ice scramble may be too generous a description of our government. Because for many of our young people — the ones packing their bags for the middle east, for Canada, for Australia, for anywhere-but-here! The Philippines has begun to feel like kropek fresh out of the oil: puffed up, loud, taking up space, but bite down and there is nothing inside. All air. All crunch. No nourishment.
Can we blame them for leaving? When the electricity bills arrive like ransom notes. When a hospital visit can bankrupt a family in a single afternoon. When every election season promises transformation and delivers instead the same dynasty in a different shirt. When the very people entrusted with the public good treat the treasury like a personal pantry — helping themselves to what was meant for the hungry, the sick, the schoolchildren who deserve better than crumbling classrooms and empty stomachs.
My God, our government is tragic. And inside this rotting, empty system are a small minority of leaders with proper values, of honest-to-goodness government employees jailed by a system cancer-ridden by corruption, eroding, eroding….
The erosion is not sudden. It never is. Cultures do not collapse overnight — they are hollowed out slowly, the way a good ingredient is removed from a recipe one substitution at a time, until you look down at what you are eating and realize you no longer recognize the dish. This is what corruption does. It is not merely a failure of governance. It is a failure of flavor. It removes the ube, the jackfruit, the real sugar — and replaces them with dye and air and the audacity to call it the same thing.
When leaders govern without moral frameworks, without accountability, without even the basic decency of shame, they do not simply steal money. They steal meaning. They steal the story we tell ourselves about who we are. And yet — and this is where I refuse to end — because the “foolish” nationalist still has a flickering hope inside (oh my gosh, its dying slowly though) that sapin-sapin still exists. Halo-halo still exists. The memory of what we are capable of being is not gone. It lives in every lola who still knows the recipe, every community kitchen feeding the displaced, every young Filipino who left not because they stopped loving this country but because loving it has become an act of grief.
Perhaps the work now is to remember what the glass was supposed to contain. To demand the beans back. The real fruit. The leche flan. To refuse the ice scramble and insist, stubbornly, joyfully, furiously — on the full, layered, complicated, glorious halo-halo that we have always deserved. We are what we eat. And we have eaten enough emptiness. It is time to cook.
