Folks who have been following my column through the years will know that I have a deep, almost obsessive love for sweetopotato. I credit this to both my mother and paternal grandmother, both of whom, despite growing up wealthy, did not let social pressures get in the way of their love of what was (and sadly, still is) considered “peasant food.”

A core memory of my grandmother is eating boiled sweetpotatoes with her while visiting her hometown of Xiamen in China’s Fujian province while she told us that sweetpotatoes were considered food for poor people. Both my paternal grandparents grew up on the island of Gulangyu, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I remember my reaction to visiting my grandfather’s home for the first time being, “He lives five minutes from the beach?! Why did he move?!” The point of my backstory is I believe that my grandmother must have broken a lot of social rules just to be able to eat her favorite root crop.

My mom, who grew up in a mansion in Quezon City, is the same. She still buys and enjoys kamote to this day, though I don’t think it was ever as stigmatized in the Philippines as it was in 1920s China. I think my mother gets her love of kamote from her mother, who was from Bulacan. In short, I come from two lines of women who take their sweetpotatoes very seriously.

In my case, this has resulted in a quest to find the best tasting sweetpotato. I’ve waxed poetic many times about the roasted sweetpotato available in Taiwanese convenience stores. It got to the point that I’d forego the usual tourist experiences like eating at night markets just so I can eat more convenience store kamote. I told you, my addiction is pretty bad.

This also means that I must try any sweetpotato I come across. On a recent trip to Japan, famous worldwide for its roasted sweetpotato (that inspired Taiwan’s production), I tried roasted sweetpotato from three sources: discount store Don Quixote (aka Donki), whose roasted sweetpotato has earned a cult following, a random vendor outside a tourist attraction, and roasted sweetpotato with a bruleed top from a cafe in a shopping street that dates back to the Edo period. All were delicious, but I still prefer the Taiwanese variety, whose origins, I was told, are a state secret.

Just because I eat a lot of sweetpotato overseas doesn’t mean I don’t at home. In fact, this is where my biggest frustrations lie. Not only is kamote expensive where I live, it also tends to be very fibrous and not sweet. I’ve lamented about this a lot in previous columns. It’s not a matter of access: our researchers are underutilized and underfunded. We have a lot of studies on which varieties offer which desirable factors. It’s all a matter of finding and implementing the right information.

I’ve also come across ads for sweetpotatoes imported from Japan, promoting them as superior over our own. While I’m not going to deny a seller their right to make money, I’m not on board with the positioning. After centuries of colonial mentality, have we not yet learned to value what we have over our previous colonizers’? But in a way, I can’t blame them. If it’s hard, even for me, to find delicious sweetpotatoes locally, it’s only natural that enterprising folks will try to sell what’s viral, even sadly at the expense of their country’s own varieties.

Now we come to the real point of this column. First, the good news: I am happy to be writing that I’ve found a local sweetpotato that rivals the varieties that have lived in my head rent free. The bad news, at least for me, is that I bought them at the market in Guinayangan, Quezon, which is 12 hours away from Manila by bus, during my recent visit with the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that they are some of the best I’ve ever had. They’re sweet, but not too sweet, still in between candy and a tuber, and they’re not fibrous at all. I sent some to my mom, who thanked me and immediately texted me to say how sweet they were (This is how you know they are excellent, because like most Asian moms, my mom doesn’t say thank you when you give her something, she tells you how you can do better next time).

I’m still in the process of finding out what the exact variety is. All I can tell you is that they’re very purple and they stain the pot you boil them in (ask me how I know). It’s my opinion that if we can develop the distribution and marketing of this variety, we can increase kamote consumption, something that I am all for. Until then, I have to figure out when I can return to Guinayangan.