Ep. 26: RG Enriquez aka “Astig Vegan” - On Plant-based Creativity, Lessons from the Newsroom, and Keeping Filipino Food’s Soul

Hidden Apron Radio

Today’s episode may seem like an oxymoron: Filipino Vegan Food. There’s no way around it, today’s topic can be a bit touchy to some. There’s a lot to unpack with the “V" word and I’ve seen conversations range from moralizing, purely economical, to downright bizarre. One things for sure though, the words “Vegan" and “Filipino", at first glance, seem like they’d be about as good a match as unripe mango and shrimp paste. Then you realize that shit’s actually really good! Today we have on the show RG Enriquez, the creative mind and cook behind “Astig Vegan”, one of the coolest Vegan Filipino resources online. Astig, by the way, is Filipino slang for kickass, and RG definitely lives up to the name. A former newsroom correspondent, RG’s road to a plant-based cuisine, which she’s been on for 12 years now, was a surprising one as there was no magic moment where she saw pictures of dying baby cows and swore off meat forever. She describes it as a gradual shift in palate and today, she’s helping many others taste the Filipino food they love - but made with plants - through her YouTube channel, blog, and live cooking demos.

We talk about her transition to a vegan lifestyle and why it’s actually given her more room to be creative with her cooking while exposing her to new flavors, her surprising sources of support and pushback, and some of her strategies for how to tell the story of your food, especially one that has so much cultural meaning to it that proposing a vegan version sometimes invites a violent reaction. RG is passionate about keeping the Filipino soul in Filipino Food and her inviting and compassionate nature embodied in her tagline “Kain na, Let’s eat”, is why I think she’s as successful and well-loved today. This one’s for everyone who's always wondered what it’s like to be transition into a plant-based lifestyle but also for those looking to invite more people to their dining tables.

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For more information including notes to the show, please visit hiddenapron.com/podcast.