How to Make Sinigang in a Warming World

Picture: Illustration of a clay pot of sinigang on top of a warming planet Earth | Malaka Gharib

In an essay posted in Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, Malaka Gharib chronicles her journey to create a climate-friendly yet culturally authentic recipe for sinigang, a Filipino sour stew.

My mom’s chief goal as a Filipino immigrant was to make her sinigang taste just like her mother’s. And for a long time, that was my aim too. 

But over the past few years, that motivation for me has changed. I want to cook food—including traditional Filipino dishes like sinigang—in ways that align more closely with my values. I want to know that my food choices have minimal impact on the environment, that I am eating in harmony with the season. 

To do that, I needed to tweak the recipes I grew up with, though I had a lot of mixed feelings about that. Part of me was worried about what it would mean to dilute these precious family heirlooms that defined so much of my childhood. Another part of me knows that for any culture to survive, it has to adapt. 

I told my friend Yana Gilbuena-Babu, a Filipino chef and the founder of Lamon, a zero-waste Filipino food festival in San Francisco, about my dilemma. She put the issue into context. Filipino cooking “is not just about authenticity anymore,” she says. “It’s about preserving our cultural identity through our culinary foodways” in the age of climate change. 

So how do I do that? How do I make a sinigang dish that honors my mother, but also the planet? To answer this question, I needed to understand the true nature of sinigang, its history and its origins, so that I could deconstruct the recipe and make something new.