As families across the Philippines gather for reunions, celebrations, and holiday feasts, the table is set with the usual stars: Lumpiang Shanghai—golden, crispy, bursting with savory fillings—and Lechon Baboy—roasted to perfection, skin crackling, meat melting in your mouth. Comfort food, staples of celebration, symbols of joy and togetherness. And yet, at this table, the menu has changed. Behind the clatter of plates and the rehearsed smiles, another course is served—one far less delicious, far more dangerous: ego, pride, and judgment.
Long before the last lumpia disappears, relatives are already being passed around like dishes on the table. Appetizers, the main course, even dessert—picked apart, compared, consumed in ridicule and silent competition. By the time the lechon is fully carved, someone else has already been carved up. Family gatherings, meant to nourish connection, now serve something far more bitter, and it’s the drama of ego on full display.
Family gatherings are sold as sacred spaces. Reunions meant to reconnect, to soften time, to remind us that we belong. In Filipino culture especially, these events come wrapped in nostalgia and obligation. You show up, you smile, you eat, but beneath the clatter of plates and the choreography of politeness, there's another tradition at work—one that turns people into talking points, lives into punchlines, and achievements into weapons.
It always starts small. While hands reach for Lumpia, someone reaches for a question, "So, what are you doing now?" The pause that follows isn't curiosity—it's calibration. In that split second, the table tilts. Food fades into background noise as the real course is served: someone's career, someone's delay, someone's failure to meet a timeline they never agreed to.
Lechon is carved with ceremony, and so are people. The knife doesn't just slice the meat; the words slice the air. "Iyan lang?" "Sayang, 'no?" "Buti pa si Ano…" "At your age, my child was already…" Each comment lands like a blade—measured, deliberate, and performative. What should be a celebration becomes judgment. What should be an admiration becomes a comparison.
Family members are dissected with the same precision and ceremony as the centerpiece on the table, each remark a scalpel tracing who falls short and who is celebrated, each sentence carving away at someone's dignity, all delivered with a smile, as if humiliation suddenly becomes palatable when served alongside rice and gravy.
Lumpiang Ego is passed around first: bite-sized insults disguised as jokes, casual remarks engineered to puff one person up while quietly crushing another. Then comes Lechong Pride, planted at the center of the table—bloated, unquestioned, impossible to ignore. Children and younger relatives are no longer family; they're exhibits, evidence, living proof that someone "made it" and someone else didn't. No one asks if they consented to being displayed, compared, or consumed. In this ritual, consent has never been on the menu.
This dynamic isn't just ugly—it's documented. Social psychologist Leon Festinger's Social Comparison Theory explains how people evaluate themselves by measuring their worth against others. Theodore Roosevelt called comparison "the thief of joy," and he was right. While comparison can sometimes motivate improvement, it just as easily breeds judgment, bias, and a warped sense of superiority. In families, where comparison is unavoidable and power is uneven, this tendency turns toxic fast. Add public settings and generational authority, and comparison becomes coercion.
Most people have the social skills and impulse control to keep these comparisons to themselves, to not act openly on the envy or resentment they trigger. But family gatherings provide cover. The feelings leak out anyway—through backhanded compliments, passive-aggressive "catch-ups," and advice that exists only to assert dominance. Studies in developmental psychology have repeatedly shown that parental and familial comparison is associated with lower self-esteem, higher anxiety, and depressive symptoms in adolescents and young adults—especially when comparisons are public and framed as "motivation." What adults call encouragement, research calls psychological risk.
And let's be honest, this isn't really about the kids. It never was. This is about adults who never learned to sit with their own unresolved failures. About people who outsource their self-worth to their children and then demand applause for it. When this happens, the reunion becomes a stage, the table a scoreboard, and the family a jury. If someone else must be smaller for you to feel tall, that isn't pride—it's panic dressed in confidence.
What makes this worse is how normalized it is. How often it's defended as "just jokes," or "tough love." How silence is expected from those being humiliated, because respect is demanded from the young but rarely practiced by the old. This is how harm survives: wrapped in familiarity, excused by age, protected by food and festivity.
So when younger people dread reunions, eat fast, avoid eye contact, or stop showing up altogether, don't blame phones. Don't blame "attitude." Don't blame modernity. Blame the table that taught them that they are only as valuable as their latest achievement. Blame the gatherings that fed on shame and called it bonding.
Yes, Lumpiang shanghai and Lechon will always be the favorites, but if we're honest, the real staples have become ego and pride—fried, roasted, and served without mercy. Until that changes, no amount of good food will make the table feel safe. Because a gathering that feeds on humiliation will never feel like home—no matter how good the viand is.
Written by John Benedict N. Banday (Veritas), Insight PH
John Benedict N. Banday (Veritas), Insight PH is a dedicated campus journalist and contributor. Their insightful writing sparks meaningful conversations and keeps the community informed.
