A tiny Filipino chili pepper takes root in Philadelphia
One Filipino woman's tending of siling labuyo, a beloved heritage pepper that advocates consider to be under threat from seed corporations, has led to the peppers being grown all across the city.
On a winter evening earlier this year, Nicky Uy and her partner Omar Buenaventura arrived at the Filipino potluck that my friends and I organize, bearing bags full of dried siling labuyo still on the stem.
I love these hot peppers. Whenever I returned to the Philippines to visit family, I’d use my elementary Tagalog to ask: Meron sili? Do you have any chilis? A server would bring them, usually whole, in a little saucer, and I’d cut them up with a fork and spoon and sprinkle them, sparingly, over my food. Naku, my dad would say, shaking his head and chuckling, amused at my taste for extreme heat. Then he’d take some too.
I never looked for them in Philly because I figured you couldn’t find them here. I never thought, maybe I could grow them.
My friend Nicky taught me otherwise.
About a decade ago, when Nicky’s mom was visiting from Manila, she brought her a gift wrapped in paper towel: siling labuyo seeds.
Nicky, who’s 49, which shocked me because she looks much younger (it’s a Filipino thing), had been in the States for 20 years by then. Growing up in Manila, she said siling labuyo wasn’t all that special to her. They were everywhere: floating in bottles of coconut vinegar at restaurants, flecking dishes of taro leaves stewed in coconut milk, growing like a weed in neighbors’ backyards.
But as she spent more and more time away from the Philippines, she began to miss food from home. She worked as a farmers market coordinator and saw how hard it was to get Filipino ingredients, to get any kind of crops from different cultures and heritages.
“Local food,” she found, meant Western, white. “There was no space for our local food,” she says.
Nicky started growing the peppers — “badly,” she insists — up on her ninth-floor office windowsill in a candy jar and by the window in her bedroom. It took almost a whole year but they fruited, white flowers giving way to nubby green chilis pointing skyward, which eventually became bright red. She’d always save some seeds for the next round of planting. But over the years, to her dismay, the peppers got tinier and tinier — a fraction of a thumbnail.
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In 2022, Nicky met Bitter Kalli, a farmer who was taking part in a fellowship to learn how to grow and harvest crops for seed. The fellowship, run by Amirah Mitchell of Sistah Seeds, emphasized saving heritage seeds, those that are culturally important to the fellows and their ancestors. Nicky and Bitter got to talking about Filipino plants — Bitter’s mother is from Jamaica and their father is from the Philippines — and Nicky shared the story of her mom’s siling labuyo. The descendants from those first seeds didn’t seem to be doing so well, Nicky told them. Maybe Bitter could revive them.
Bitter, who is 27, remembers Nicky giving them “this container of very beautiful dried peppers.” Bitter extracted the seeds from with a tiny knife, and planted at their farm, Star Apple, in the Lehigh Valley.
Later that season, Bitter reported back: Nicky’s mom’s siling labuyo was flourishing, the germination rate high. It was validating, Nicky said, after growing the peppers all those years in unconventional ways.
After harvesting the peppers, Bitter again extracted their seeds — this time, several pounds of them — and gave them to TrueLove Seeds, a seed farm and company based in Glen Mills, to sell.
This spring, thanks to Nicky, Bitter, TrueLove, and the broader farming and Filipino community, siling labuyo is thriving across Philadelphia.
Lailah Lindsey, a Black and Filipino farmer whose great-grandfather is from the Philippines, is planting it in Southwest Philly at the Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden. Lindsey, who is 24, didn’t grow up with it but she says, “the ancestral memory in me is strong.” Bitter’s growing it too, at their new location in Kensington. And so is Nicky, in her Center City backyard, alongside other hard-to-find Filipino crops, like calamansi and giant, fanlike taro leaves.
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Local food advocates consider siling labuyo to be under threat.
In the Philippines, seed corporations have flooded the market with another, similar-looking pepper called siling Taiwan or siling tingala — a high-yield, imported hybrid that’s longer, pointier, and not as hot. These days, in Filipino markets, it’s easier to find siling tingala, sometimes mislabeled, masquerading as siling labuyo.
“We are bombarded by misinformation” from food brands and the media, said Filipino heritage food advocate John Sherwin Felix, so it makes sense that people don’t know how to spot the real siling labuyo. But it’s important to fight for the pepper’s existence, he has written. “Siling labuyo,” he says, “is part of our culinary history.”
At the same time, siling labuyo abounds in Filipino yards, tended by home gardeners. Its name, after all, means “wild chili.” Birds love the peppers and Nicky likes to say they might “gift” you a plant by leaving droppings in your garden.
In Philly, siling labuyo exists in a similar context. Instead of being available commercially, it’s shared hand-to-hand within communities.
As Nicky said to me: “Seeds are good at teaching me things about abundance.”
That night at the potluck, when Nicky and Omar brought the dried peppers, my friends and I did as we were told and took some home.
We used them to spice pickle brine and stuck them in vases and ate them whole, straight from the stem — showing off just a little. (OK, that was me.)
Upon Nicky’s encouragement, I crushed the dried peppers right into a little pot filled with soil. A few weeks later, I gasped. The tiniest wisp of pale green unfurling. Now: so many. I share the seedlings with my friends.