Bacolod City’s upcoming Terra Madre Asia and Pacific (TMAP) 2025 has been selected by luxury and lifestyle travel magazine Condé Nast Traveller as one of the world’s top food festivals.
The magazine recently announced the inclusion of TMAP 2025, slated for November 19 to 23, in its “11 food festivals across the world to plan your travels around” article, which featured food festivals from various countries that are happening from September 2025 to April 2026.
“If you want to understand a place, it’s often best to start with what’s on its table. Food festivals around the world condense a region’s identity into a few days of concentrated flavor: dishes cooked by the people who carry traditions forward alongside chefs rewriting them; street snacks eaten elbow-to-elbow with strangers; entire neighborhoods turned into a cultural buffet,” Condé Nast declares.
“[From] street snacks, [to] Michelin-starred dinners, [to] ancient harvest rituals—here are the festivals that map the world through flavor,” it added.
The list includes Taste of Chicago, Singapore Food Festival, Perú Mucho Gusto, New York City Wine and Food Festival, Dartmouth Food Festival (England), MAD Symposium in Copenhagen, Samhain Festival of Food and Culture (Ireland), Madrid Fusión, San Sebastian Gastronomika (Spain), and Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.
Dubbed, “Terra Madre Salone del Gusto,” Slow Food’s premier global biennial gathering in Turin, Italy since 2004, this year’s edition marks its regional debut in Asia and the Pacific, to be held in the Philippines.
More than 2,000 delegates from over 20 countries across Asia and the Pacific—including India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, and Thailand — will converge at the Provincial Capitol Lagoon and Park in Bacolod City for the five-day event, a press release from Reena Gamboa, TMAP executive director, said Thursday, Oct. 16.
With the theme “From Soil to Sea: A Slow Food Journey Through Tastes and Traditions,” TMAP 2025 will bring together farmers, fishers, indigenous leaders, chefs, cooks, academics, youth, and cultural advocates to celebrate food biodiversity and advance sustainable food systems rooted in tradition, fairness, and care for the environment.
It will feature a Foodways Exhibition which anchors the event with four staples—rice, spices, soy, and taro — while a Community Kitchen turns Bacolod City’s 61 barangays into one vast, living cookbook, according to Condé Nast.
Visitors can expect tastings, street food stalls, and Ark of Taste products like batuan, criollo cacao, artisanal muscovado, and traditional sea salts.
Panels on food justice and climate resilience run alongside sensory workshops, an Education Pavilion, and the Slow Food Coffee Coalition.
A roster of more than 100 chefs and mixologists from across Asia and the Pacific, including from Negros Occidental, will showcase these ingredients in dishes and drinks, cementing Bacolod City as the new “Center for Sustainable Gastronomy” and Negros Occidental as the “Organic Capital of the Philippines.”
“Terra Madre may still gather in Turin every two years, but its regional boughs show how the movement now flows outwards, adapting to each place while keeping the same core concept as food as the bond between people, cultures, and ecosystems,” Condé Nast concluded.*