Feeding Manila in Peace and War by Daniel Doeppers
Being sheltered in place has pushed me (and I imagine a few others) to begin the rather difficult process of confronting truths we’d rather ignore. In the three weeks I’ve spent reading this - a book that’s been on my shelf for some time - nearly every page felt like a tug of war between the perspective I could now observe Manila through, and what I remember of growing up in a megacity that wove an endless patchwork of realities together.
With every new thing I learned about Manila, I felt a little grip loosen in my memory - like finally clearing bottlenecks of traffic peppered throughout the metro.
If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t mind 350 pages to bring you into another world (though really, isn’t that the purpose of literature?) then I highly recommend the read.
Introduction: Why Provisionment?
In essence, this book is an in-depth study of how Manila kept its residents fed during a critical period of its growth, between the end of Spanish rule and American occupation at the turn of the 20th century. If you know an elder who grew up in the Philippines, and is currently in their late 70s and up, this book is about what Manila was like (which in turn, probably influenced what they ate, wherever they were in the country) for them as young children. I think it’s rather fun to unravel these connections.
This level of study on Manila’s provisioning systems, Doeppers says, is “critical to understanding how the great cities of the region have been able to grow so large,” and is a theme “sorely neglected” in Southeast Asian studies. “What were the products ordinarily consumed by the people of the metropolis and how did the mix change over time?” he asks.
Further, how were foods that people ate produced, where did they come from, how did they get to the city, and how much did they cost?
Part 1: The Rice Trade
“Simply stated, rice made Manila possible,” Doeppers writes. The city, he reminds us, “was chosen as the site of the imposed Spanish capital…because it was one of the few good port sites in the archipelago that could be supplied with an ongoing stream of rice from nearby production areas.”
The biggest thing I learned in this section was about the inner and outer zones that supplied Manila with rice. In the mid-19th century, Doeppers writes, “rice was delivered to the city by small watercraft on a daily basis.” The casco - a flat-bottomed boat that meandered through Luzon’s river systems - was the vessel of choice for transporting various states of the rice crop, brought to the city as husked, milled, or polished.
The vessels, Doeppers explains, first arrived to supply the Spanish capital via two main river arteries: the northern network that traversed through Bulacan province, and the southern network that came from east of Manila, starting in the province of Laguna and emptying into the Pasig River. This was known as the “inner zone” of towns that directly supplied Manila, primarily with grains and vegetables. In the later 19th century, an “outer zone” that connected Manila with even more ports - more than 40 across coastal Luzon and Visayas, plus select ports in southern Mindanao - became necessary to keeping the residents of Manila (and by extension the colonial regime) fed. Doeppers collected and analyzed all this data by examining reports of maritime cargoes that entered Manila.
I learned a lot about how rice was grown in the plains of Central Luzon, traditionally and as farmers needed to adapt with cultivation methods for new strains of rice, increasingly imported from the Canton and Mekong river deltas. Personally, I find it fascinating to think about the level of trade and commerce that took place between the merchants, traders and locals from neighbouring Asian lands. Think of all the information they exchanged!
Part 2: Ulam: What You Eat With Rice
While the foods that most people ate still varied with the seasons, Doeppers writes, “the consumption of fruits and vegetables was and is one of the most income-sensitive aspects of family diets in the Philippines, particularly for those with incomes that barely cover the cost of daily carbohydrates.” I couldn’t agree more, and it’s as true today as it was then.
I follow a number of Philippines-based food advocacy groups on Instagram, and see a shift, though it’s slowly happening, of typical “relief good” packages distributed to communities having more fresh fruit and vegetables in place of instant noodles and canned goods.
In the book I learned about “The Metropolitan Garden Ring”, composed of hundreds of fruit and vegetable orchards in the hills of Antipolo, past the Marikina valley. On my last visit to the Philippines, I visited the Masungi Georeserve, part of the same Sierra Madre mountain range - and I totally relish the visual of those ridges and hills bursting with produce, destined for Manila’s markets.
The mountainous Sierra Madre range seen from Masungi.
Some of my favourite accounts in the book are from two gentlemen named Buzeta and Bravo, whose “gazetteer of 1850-51 provide considerable detail,” Doeppers writes. Buzeta, who lived in the rapidly urbanizing Malate district, describes the following places in his Manila.
Pasay was a place of “delightful jardines and fruitful kitchen-gardens filled with fruit trees of several species, and vegetables carried to the market on a daily basis.” Further south, Buzeta says, “was Paranaque, where just inland, there were beautiful gardens with fruit trees such as lemons, oranges and bananas, as well as uncommon specialty products that also came from gardens here.”
There certainly weren’t any lemon, orange or banana trees in the version of Paranaque I grew up in, but I do remember eating blueberry-sized, ripe red fruit from the aratiles tree.
In the furthest corner of our schoolyard, there was a tall, really leafy tree, with two sets of stacked monkey bars always parked underneath. In fifth grade, we had an unspoken war with the caretaker, who dragged the metal jungle gym across the yard back to its original place three times before realizing it was pointless. We needed the monkey bars to get at the fruit.
Aratiles berries were sugary sweet, and they weren’t an ulam, but snacking on these was the highlight of my day. It was also, I argued, the reason I needed three sets of navy blue trousers - not skirts - from the school uniform catalog. Equally pointless boys, I knew, were always at the foot of the jungle gym.
Back in the book, I learned about viajeros - travelling buyers whose work involved collecting produce from farmers in the countryside, then bringing those products into Manila to sell for a profit. Records kept in Manila ports, Doeppers writes, show loads of citrus coming in from Batangas, and “important quantities” of onions and garlic from Vigan, in the northern Ilocos region. With a growing number of European citizens (and aristocratic families who quickly adopted Spanish cooking techniques) in Manila, farms in the surrounding countryside just couldn’t provide the amount this changing city needed.
I know this, but I’m still a little mind-blown. What I knew as Filipino cooking didn’t always start with the trinity of garlic, onions, and tomatoes that I start all of my own cooking with.
Doeppers writes about a viajera named Natividad Gamboa who, for over 20 years, “went to different places buying vegetables: Pangasinan, Tarlac, and Bataan in the hot season, Cavite and Laguna in the rainy season.” Viajeros developed alongside Manila-bound railways, and Natividad’s life, like many, revolved around produce. At night, in provincial stations, she’d load her produce onto freight cars, then ride with the train and arrive in Manila’s Tutuban Station by dawn, before “we used our own carabao kariton [cart] to deliver to customers in different markets in the city,” as Doeppers relates.
On fishing and aquaculture, I learned about indigenous fish-netting techniques, that Manila Bay’s corrals (made with bamboo) made it one of the world’s most concentrated areas of aquaculture in the 1930s, that bangus was primarily cultivated, and that at that same time Las Pinas and Paranaque had many smokehouses which processed “fish caught locally by means of the round haul seine and light system” called “sapyaw”.
Also, chickens were not always a primary source of protein. As late as the 1910s, Doeppers writes, “there were still few chicken growers of any significant scale.” The Bureau of Agriculture even tried to cross Cantonese hens with Rhode Island Red roosters in attempts to expand the industry. Eggs, I learned, were a highly problematic foodstuff to deal with. Because they were never in much demand until then, poultry farmers in the Philippines had no need to develop large-scale collecting methods. In China, commercial egg production was already long established, and to supply Manila’s demand, eggs from the Chinese mainland were shipped in from Hong Kong.
On beef and cattle husbandry, he writes, “three local cattle systems can be identified in the 19th and early 20th century Philippines: free-range grazing, the Batangas practice of considerable individual bovine care, and finally, the emergence in the Bukidnon highlands of imported zebu cattle using upland pastures.” This whole section adds another dimension to my appreciation of classic Tagalog beef dishes. What I’d give for a bowl of bulalo.
Part 3: Fluids and Fashions (On the importance of water, flour, coffee and cocoa)
I learned that Manila has always relied on a potable water delivery system, and that cascos - those flat-bottomed boats - were a turn-of-the-century equivalent to the weekly deliveries of drinking water that came in five-gallon plastic jugs to our home. In large earthen jugs called “banga”, clean well water was delivered from the “outer zone” provinces into communities in Manila, via the city’s network of canals. “As in many other colonial and Third World cities, water carriers were essential in the absence of high-standard utility infrastructure,” Doeppers writes.
I believe I also came across the ad that came up in my podcast interview with Alex Orquiza, who teaches in the field of Philippine-American studies. Many things are coming together!
Flour, I knew, came largely into use during the American occupation, though wheat noodles brought by Chinese merchants as well as Spanish cakes and breads were already consumed in the Philippines for centuries.
The national consumption of flour, Doeppers writes, “escalated so rapidly in the 20th century that it cannot possibly be accounted for by the food needs of foreigners alone.” The rise of bread as a major food product came in the form of pan de sal, consumed by a growing middle class who needed something quick, delicious, and inexpensive for breakfast and merienda. Panciterias began to proliferate, “often run by Cantonese and patronized by the ordinary public,” and with the demand for noodles “hundreds of small stores that were licensed to sell foodstuffs…[banded] together with large ‘sari-sari’ stores” to sell imported wheat flour and noodles. An interesting piece of trivia on the common neighbourhood store!
I’ve researched quite a bit on Philippine coffee, but here learned that for about fifty years, the country exported more than a million kilos of coffee beans leading up to the 1900s. Cacao seeds, I knew, were also brought onboard the Manila-Acapulco galleons, and took well to local soils. Again referencing Buzeta and Bravo, Doeppers writes, “Batangas and Cebu were the most notable provinces for quality production circa 1850…(and) among these, Argao, Cebu was singled out for the volume and superior quality of its cocoa.
Good thing I’ve had a chance to sample that!
Part 4: Wartime Provisioning and Mass Starvation
This last chapter is detailed, with a narrative that weaves oral histories from people who lived in Manila through the early 20th century. There are stories about black market eggs, the government’s failed “victory garden” campaign, eating “sisid” rice rescued from the hulls of ships that sank years before, the emergence of “buy and sell” in everyday commerce.
I definitely support - really, I’m short of a rally cry - the need to collect and cross-reference oral anecdotes when and where we can, particularly as it relates to food habits and traditions at risk of disappearing, in rural as well as urban areas. It’s why “Philippines on a Plate,” hosted by the Philippine Culinary Heritage Movement for Filipino Food Month, was really the best accompaniment to reading this book. I highly recommend watching a few videos of the April 2020 talks online!
It’s been quite the trip reading about this from my bedroom in Toronto. So many layers to Manila I had no idea of. Reading it at this particular time, honestly, made this otherwise technical book into a form of escapist fiction - weaving in stories from another world, to places I know by heart.