10 June 2026
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Dr. Gideon Lasco, Ph.D., was the designated grocery runner at the start of the pandemic. As a physician in the family, he was assigned to the essentials. One day at a supermarket he noticed how people ran to the freezers to hoard a certain type of frozen food: ice cream. He recounts that tubs of his favorite brand sold out faster than rice.
At the height of a crisis, why do people desire ice cream? Meanwhile, Lasco himself stockpiled 10 bottles of Tabasco hot sauce. The answer lies in primal comfort, something that eased uncertainty.
“Comfort food is not something to be downplayed or dismissed as mere caprice of human beings.”
Lasco, whose work has influenced the modern understanding of Philippine culture and identity, shares that comfort food had to satisfy three elements.
The first is personal: a return to something familiar, rooted in memory. The second is cultural: a collective nostalgia or resonance for what feels ours. The third is physiological — meeting the body’s biochemical demands.
A Return to Familiar Ground
“At the individual level, comfort food is rooted in nostalgia or a sense of familiarity,” Lasco says. “During the pandemic, which was unfamiliar territory, people flocked to the familiar. Ice cream was familiar.”
Comfort food, in this sense, is always a homecoming — a literal return to a dish you grew up eating or a longing for flavors that feel like home. Lasco, an avid mountaineer, fondly recalls dashing a few drops of Tabasco over campfire food, a tiny triumph of the taste buds enjoyed above sea level.
“Meals can be very comforting after a difficult situation,” Lasco says. He had just finished another hike along the mountainous border of Zambales and Pampanga. After 22 hours and a staggering 60,000 steps, he craved chicken inasal (which can be enjoyed at the Bib Gourmand Aida’s Chicken in Makati) or crispy pata or tapang baboy damo (cured boar meat) with rice — lots of it.
The Flavors We Inherit
To talk about nostalgia, we talk about age. The older we get, the more places we’ve been, the more places food can bring us back to. But the older generation doesn’t hold a monopoly on cultural taste-making: What younger people want also influences the market today.
“Younger people are exposed to more flavors,” Lasco observes. “Their range of what comfort food can be is much broader.” He welcomes this development because food is a palatable entry point for embracing diversity and other cultures, as seen in the demand for matcha and Green Tea KitKat.
Lasco has discussed why Filipinos have a sweet tooth, but in this conversation he highlighted the dialectic process between the older and younger generations through another beverage: bubble tea. Because younger folks have become more health-conscious, customizing sugar levels has unlocked the comfort of control.
“Aside from having a sense of familiarity at the individual level, what we agree to be comfort food is rooted in the cultural landscape of a particular country,” continues Lasco. “There has to be cultural familiarity and resonance.”
What a country collectively craves must take root in its soil. Lasco turns to ube, the purple yam popping up all over the world — such as the signature ube Basque cake in the Two-Starred Kasama in Chicago.
Ube is native to the Philippines, but rice is not. Like most of the vegetables in the Bahay Kubo folk song (which One-Starred Toyo Eatery turned into a dish), rice was introduced to the archipelago by Austronesian settlers thousands of years after the natives subsisted on root crops like ube.
Food, Place and Belonging
“Not all cravings are comfort food,” Lasco carefully says. “I’m a big fan of sushi. I like nodoguro, otoro, chutoro — I can enumerate 30 different kinds of fish that I like — but I wouldn’t necessarily call sushi my comfort food.” (Satisfy sushi cravings at MICHELIN-selected spots: Ginza Nagaoka in Parañaque or Yamazato in Pasay.)
“Cravings can be experimental or playful. For example, I’m craving horchata (a Mexican rice milk drink) right now. But comfort food is a return to familiar culinary territory.”
While cravings are curious and adventurous, comfort food moves in the opposite direction: It comes home. We return to the flavors we grew up with: champorado (chocolate porridge) when it rains, chicken sopas to get through a storm, sinigang even on a sweltering day and ginisang monggo (sautéed mung beans) only ever on Fridays.
“A place has the agency to shape the food you like,” Lasco continues. “There are certain dishes that make more sense when consumed in your own house, but also, there’s comfort food that you enjoy most in a hotel, or at your workplace, or back in your college dorm.”
As much as Lasco loved tinola (chicken in ginger broth), he says he would never think of ordering it at a mall. “It’s hard to disentangle food from place. Another example is lechon. Of course you’re not going to crave lechon when you’re in Manila the way you crave it when you’re in Cebu.” (When in Cebu, however, make a stop at House of Lechon.)
The Privilege of Preference
Comfort begs a question of class. Lasco recalls being a student at the Philippine General Hospital. His parents had asked him to look after their trusted laborers visiting from the province. Eager to show them the city life, he brought them to a popular Italian food chain that was present in most local malls. But after noticing their polite yet deflated expressions from eating pasta and salad, his younger self understood belatedly that the iconic Jollibee would have made them happier.
“The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu studied how taste is essentially a function of class — of your position within a social field. There are places where food is just sustenance. To be even concerned about flavor is a luxury in itself.”
What we reach for when we celebrate, and similarly when we grieve, is defined by what we had access to. And access does more than shape our preferences.
What we hope to get from food — satiation, delight, comfort — is determined by where we stand. We can offer the best of what we know, but we cannot decide what comfort is for someone else.
What Comfort Feeds
“The last thing to consider when deciding whether food is comfort food is the nutritional aspect,” Lasco says. “Is it able to provide what your body needs?” After a strenuous hike, the body demands protein and carbs to replenish what it burned. Women report intense chocolate cravings during their period, the body signaling a response to iron loss.
But humans are complex, Lasco admits. We don’t listen to what our bodies need as much as we give in to what we want: “Ice cream is bad, but I want to feel good.”
Like infants crying for milk, we crave certain types of food not just for survival but for solace. We long for flavors that stir memory, textures that satisfy the soul. When things fall apart, food has a way of keeping us whole.
A few hours later, their hosts — who have been quietly living in this cluster of islands, invisible on the horizon some 300 nautical miles south of Taiwan — presented them with a humble feast of just-caught lobsters and crabs. All the while, their heads were bowed, unaware that it was the most comforting meal anyone from anywhere could ever have.
