Filipinos know food, the way you know a language you grew up speaking. Ask anyone what makes a good adobo, or why lechon skin has to be a certain kind of crackling, or which province does the best kinilaw (vinegar-cured raw seafood salad), and you’ll get an answer with conviction—sometimes an argument, always with pride.
It makes sense, then, that a culture this fluent in food would also fold its deepest beliefs into the same plate. And just like how heirloom recipes get passed down from generation to generation, these superstitions, or pamahiin, also get inherited—accepted without a word, and practiced with no question.
The New Year’s table
Every December 31st, our Media Noche spread must include the prosperity fruit basket. It has 12 round fruits—always 12, always round. Twelve, because the year has 12 months. Round like a coin, to signify money that kept circulating instead of running dry. No one in my family ever questioned this logic out loud. We just kept buying the fruit, every single year, like skipping it might genuinely cost us something.
And in the minutes before the clock hits midnight, all my single aunties would duck under the table with 12 grapes cupped in their hands. One grape per toll of the clock, and all 12 had to be eaten before 12:01 a.m. for the wish to count. Twelve grapes for 12 chances—one per month—to ask the coming year for what the last one hadn't given them: someone to sit beside at the table instead of ducking under it alone again next December.
We never served chicken on New Year's Eve, either. For younger me, that was a bummer; fried chicken was my favorite, and New Year's was exactly the day I couldn't have it. My Lola would say we don't want our family to be "isang kahig, isang tuka" (one scratch, one peck) the whole year, like a chicken that only ever finds enough to survive the day, and none to save for the next.
Then there's the biko (rice cake), made from glutinous rice, coconut milk, and brown sugar. The belief goes that sticky rice keeps a family bound together the way the grains cling to each other in the pan. We always had it, and for years I thought it was because it was my mom's favorite. Getting older means realizing it was her way of saying something she never said directly—please let us stay close this year.
Looking back, it makes sense that New Year's Day carries more superstition for us Filipinos than almost any other day on the calendar: it's the one night to get a head start, to walk into January already a little bit lucky. I don't think anyone who practices these pamahiin actually believed that the universe was counting fruit in baskets. I think we just liked the feeling of trying, of doing something—anything—on the one night of the year that felt like it mattered.
Birthdays and conception
Pancit showed up at every birthday I can remember. The pamahiin goes that the celebrant should eat long noodles to be granted a longer life, and cutting them short would cut that life short, too. It’s a belief almost too silly to say out loud, and yet I never saw anyone risk testing it—not even the practical, otherwise unsuperstitious adults. Believer or not, nobody gambles with the life of someone they love.
These superstitions persisted long before anyone got pancit on their birthdays, back when you were nothing more than a hope in someone’s belly. My auntie made sure there was no dark-colored food in sight, and light-colored food was pushed toward my pregnant cousin’s plate. One would think it was because dark dishes were heavy on seasonings bad for the baby in the womb, but it was said to give the baby porcelain, doll-like skin.
Balut (fertilized duck egg) was a different kind of belief entirely. Before I could read a clock, I had my own system for telling time. When the cry of “Tahoooo!” (warm soy custard) drifted down the street, it was early morning; when I heard “Baluuut!”, it was time to get ready for bed.
The uncles selling balut pitched it to their male patrons as “pampalakas ng tuhod” (a knee strengthener). As a kid, I took it literally. I thought it was for strong bones, and wondered why only men needed it, and why it was only ever sold at night. It took me years to learn that the knees were never the point. Balut was for stamina, a fertility booster, and the whole street knew it. Before there was a baby, there was the wanting of one, and apparently there was a basket of eggs for that.
Food left for the dead
During Undas (All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day), my Lola would set a plate aside, piled with biko with a side of a tobacco cigarette, and a candle burning beside it. As a kid, my curiosity was louder than my manners: I wanted to poke at it, sneak a bite, ask who it was really for. My Lola would say it was her alay (offering) for the dead. In case my late Lolo came to visit, she wanted his favorites waiting at the table when he arrived.
It sat untouched overnight, and by morning the biko was a little cold and a little stale, and quietly cleared away. This never felt like superstition to me; it felt like a way of telling our departed loved ones that we remember what they loved. Food as memory. Food as a small, stubborn refusal to let go completely, even years later when the grief has softened into something gentler.
Then there's a different type of alay when guests are unwelcome: in Filipino folk belief, creatures coexisted with humans, sharing the same houses, trees, and nights. One creature was the small but terrible nuno sa punso, a goblin said to live in anthills. The stories say there are two kinds—the good and the bad. The good ones are given an alay to bring you fortune, and the bad ones are given one so they will leave you in peace. The alay differs from place to place, but in my Lola’s province, it was cooked rice, eggs, and wine, left at the edge of the mound.
Unfortunately, not every creature could be won over with rice, such as the aswang, a shape-shifting flesh-eater, and its winged variant, the manananggal, a creature that splits at the waist. Funnily enough, the weapons against them were the ingredients we cooked with. Folklore says the aswang couldn’t stand the smell of garlic, so townspeople hung bulbs over their entryways to keep it out. Salt was for the manananggal—when she split in two to hunt, with her lower half left standing somewhere in the dark, a sprinkle of salt on it meant she could never rejoin before sunrise.
My Lola trusted garlic and salt more than any prayer.
What the table taught me
Beyond the big occasions, there were smaller rules threaded through ordinary days; the kind you forget are superstitions because they’ve just been how things are done.
None of these rules came with real reason. Ask why, and you’d get a shrug, maybe a laugh. “That’s what my mother did.” Some of them, I suspect, were also parenting tactics in disguise: the nuno sa punso, aswang, and manananggal were perhaps a symbolic, convenient way to keep disobedient children in line. Every region had its own version, shaped by its own fears, values, and passions.
I don’t know if I actually believe any of this. I don’t think 12 grapes control my chances of finding romance. I don’t think eating chicken on New Year’s Eve will affect my finances, or that a noodle decides how long anyone lives. Yet I still buy 12 round fruits every December; I still hold my breath a little when someone reaches for scissors near a birthday pancit.
Even though I know better now, I think I finally understand why.
It was never really about whether these superstitions worked. These rules were passed down to me the same way recipes were—quietly, meal after meal—until they became part of how I understood my family and the community around me. Food in our house was never just about hunger. It was doing double duty, feeding us and trying, however impossibly, to look out for us, too.
Maybe that’s the real inheritance: not the belief itself, but the memory of people who cared enough to try to control the uncontrollable, with food as the only tool they had.
