Written by Matthew Celestial
It begins in the aisles of an Asian supermarket. For me, a child of Filipino immigrants, the trip itself was the ritual. Every other weekend, my brother and I would groan as my mother buckled us into the car for the long drive into the city. “Why can’t we just shop at the local grocery store?” we’d complain. She’d glance at us in the rearview mirror and simply say: “They don’t have what we need.”
And what we needed wasn’t only food. It was memory. It was continuity. It was home, stretched across the Pacific and repackaged in fluorescent-lit aisles and freezer sections.
Inside, time seemed to bend. My mother would pause at a box of crackers or a bag of dried mangoes, and her face would light up. “When I was growing up, I ate this every day,” she’d say, placing it into the cart like a souvenir from another life. Sometimes, she’d hand something to my grandmother. “This reminds me of Lola, Nanay.” My grandmother would smile as if she had been transported back to her own kitchen, back to the long afternoons of simmering broths and spoon-feeding us when we visited.
Meanwhile, my brother and I conducted our own archaeology of wonder. We lifted the lids of buckets filled with live crabs, shrieking as they clattered against one another. We sprinted through the seafood section, daring each other to withstand the brine-heavy air. Even the mingling scent of raw fish, meat and tropical fruit became stitched into memory, the unmistakable smell of “back home” in the middle of a Canadian city.
Anthropologists often write that food is the most intimate form of culture. It is one thing to wear a garment from another place, or to hear a language spoken. But food–tasted, chewed, shared, dissolves the distance between here and there. As the writer James Baldwin once observed, “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” Food, in that sense, is the condition that anchors us when place is disrupted.
For immigrants, supermarkets like T&T are more than commerce. They are cultural epicentres. They are museums and memory banks, each shelf carrying the artifacts of another world. A jar of bagoong or a tin of SkyFlakes crackers can transport someone decades and oceans away. They are where nostalgia becomes tangible, where longing is alleviated by the simple act of purchase.
And these spaces are not static. According to Statistics Canada, more than 7.5 million people, one in five Canadians, are foreign-born. With that comes a mosaic of tastes, rituals and cravings. Walk through any T&T on a weekend afternoon and you’ll see generations shopping together: grandparents pointing out the brands of their childhood, parents stocking up on essentials for familiar recipes, children slipping Pocky sticks and Hello Panda biscuits into the cart. It is a choreography of memory and adaptation.
Years later, I find myself making those same trips. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends curious about Filipino dishes they’ve only read about. I am the one picking up the ingredients my mother once sought out, I am the one telling the stories. “This reminds me of home. Taste it.”
And so, working with T&T Supermarket became more than a professional milestone. It was a full-circle honour. It was proof that the foods of my childhood, once tucked into plastic bags and driven across town, now belonged in the broader conversation of Canadian culture. It meant that the dishes my grandmother made on quiet Sunday afternoons were not just private acts of remembrance, but part of a collective narrative.
Food, after all, is how we make sense of belonging. It reminds us that “home” is not defined by geography, but by the people who gather at the table. It is the spoon offered by a grandmother, the snack pulled from a shelf, the story retold each time a taste unlocks a memory.
T&T, in that sense, is not only a supermarket. It is a bridge. A reminder that the flavours we carry are not just about sustenance, but about survival, connection, and love.
And for me, it is the place where I learned that nostalgia doesn’t just live in the past. It lives in the present moment, every time I unwrap a treat, taste a broth or pass a story forward, aisle by aisle, memory by memory.