Eating out: Reconstituting the Philippines’ public kitchens

The communal Philippine kitchen as tradition

Prior to Spanish conquest, communal meals have been noted to be an ardent feature in different Filipino communities. Junker (1999) reiterates the importance of communal feasts in structuring hierarchies within and among precolonial Philippine societies that participated in reciprocal exchange partnerships. The feasts that were carried out to commemorate the connections between different localities were so grand in scale that contributions from the entire village were necessary. Birth, death, harvests, the succession of leadership, conquests, trade alliances and other events deemed important to the whole tribe merited feasts that gathered the resources of the entire village in order to brandish the ruling chief’s ability to mobilize his constituency and the resources they had amassed under his rule. These feasts enhanced the status of the ruling elite, and were equally important in defining the lives of the commoner as both cooking preparations and the feasts themselves diffused the boundaries dividing kin from neighbors and outsiders. Although everyone’s labor was directed towards the requirements of the ruling chiefs whose functions as peacekeeper and community organizer took precedence over the village’s other activities, the same feasts ritualized a sense of belonging and camaraderie within the community, between communities that would otherwise bear no relation, and provided a reprieve from routine.

With the arrival of the Spaniards, traditional feasting celebrations were incorporated into systematic religious festivals. Numerous town fiestas became the centerpiece of Spanish colonial organization. Each town successfully integrated within the Spanish pueblo system was given a patron saint that was commemorated every year. Not surprisingly, most of these celebrations coincided either with the harvest season or the anniversaries of historic events important to the locality. These not only supplied the produce needed to mount the fiesta but also became tools to reproduce important religious ideals. For instance, the famous Ati-Atihan Festival of Kalibo, Aklan, in the island of Panay, is an amalgamation of pre-Spanish and colonial Spanish conventions. The festival, which celebrated initially the arrival to the island of ten Malay chiefs who fled Borneo and drove away the indigenous Ati, became infused with veneration to the Santo Niño or the Holy Child believed to have interceded in the mass conversion of locals around the archipelago. The fiestas in the Philippines reified the significance of foreign religion in the everyday lives of the locals, attaching saints to the accomplishments and memories of the community. Fiestas became integral in signifying the power of religion, often providing the culminating climax for work carried on throughout the year as expressive of the eternal salvation promised after a lifetime of suffering and affliction. Despite being religious in function, fiestas continued to reinforce old forms of social and political structures. The town leaders utilized these events as an opportunity to reiterate their centrality in the community’s affairs, funding many of the activities and directing their resources including the labor of their constituents whose participation meant the performance of communal food preparation and feasting.

However, these feasts only occurred a few times a year and were not enough to sustain the practice of shared meals. Fiestas reproduced the hierarchical power of the landowner whose sponsorship of communal feasts demanded the compliance of the community under their authority. The congregation of the public had to find a different space that allowed them to evade – albeit momentarily – the scrutiny and inhibitions imposed by the elites. Despite the insurmountable labor demands that accompanied Spanish occupation, the colonial government’s insistence on commercializing agriculture provided an opportunity for the landless Filipinos to alter the meaning and significance of public kitchens and imbibe it with functions that they themselves determined.

Hoping to turn the colony into a profitable enterprise, Spain did all it could to commercialize agricultural production by focusing on key products. On a larger scale, the colonial government was able to transform a predominantly subsistence-driven economy into the beginnings of industrial production by amassing large quantities of crops like rice, tobacco and hemp. Rice, for instance, enjoyed a dramatic change in production and consumption. Although rice had been in existence in the archipelago long before Spanish rule and was the preferred food in most parts of the country, its use as an everyday staple proved too laborious and time-consuming (Scott 1994: 35–36). It was customarily considered a luxury item and figured heavily in a number of ritual and ceremonial observances. With Spain’s focus attuned towards its commercial production, rice became readily available as a food staple and became a vital component in colonial taxation. In the 17th century, it replaced the cash tributes first demanded from Filipinos in the century prior, and became the currency for rent in religious lands and private estates throughout the country. By doing so, the Spanish government was able to control the price of rice, devaluing it in order to extract more tributes that fueled its production (Corpuz 1989: 102). The country’s increased output of rice was offset by its utilization in taxation, thus intensifying the need for the nobility to take over more land and absorb more workers. It is in this climate of devalued peasant labor that the public kitchen has been reinvented anew. As work in the fields became more intense, it left barely enough time, energy and resources for carrying out domestic chores. Farm workers pooled their resources together and transfered the preparation of food from their living quarters out into the field. The increased pressure to produce commercial crops left many peasants struggling to feed themselves, as much of their energy was co-opted to satisfy increasing quotas and to pay for accumulating debt.

Although many positive attributes were to be attached to this kind of food preparation and way of eating, these valuations were to come much later. For most of the Spanish period, communal eating suffered the stigma of class and gender differentiation. Assigning the house as the woman’s domain effectively created a rift between domestic chores carried out privately and publicly. Privilege was accorded to the upper class that could afford to partition the spaces they occupied. Cleanliness was to become an over-elaborated virtue, and was expressed spatially through the insistence that the order and organization of the private domain reflected the desirable quality of the women who kept it. On the other hand, women who had to perform such chores in public for lack of access or ability to compartmentalize their domains and conceal it from the rest of the community crystallized into the undesirable opposite. Tasks such as cleaning, doing laundry and cooking were held with so much disdain that their enactment in public became an identifier of one’s poor standing in society.

That stigma carried over to food-related functions. Modesto de Castro’s Urbana at Felisa (1938), a proto-novel first released in 1864, featured an epistolary exchange that revolved around proper conduct and virtue. Through a series of 34 letters, oldest sibling Urbana (urbane) instructs siblings Felisa (happiness) and, occasionally, Honesto (honesty) with the edicts of religious beliefs and how these should be applied to specific circumstances and interactions in daily life. In one of these letters, Urbana inculcates the virtue of cleanliness to her sister Felisa with reference to the use of the proper utensils for eating:

It is not unusual for us Tagalogs to use cutlery for eating, and I will write about the different rules to follow. I know you don’t need much of what I have to say since you have been using them properly, but it is important for us to remind others who don’t realize the importance of using cutlery because what will happen to someone who uses their hands to eat after being invited to a banquet? They will be forcibly shamed. It is my wish that the habit of using cutlery becomes inculcated throughout the Tagalog region. All European countries, as well as America, practice this habit, and it would be wrong not to. Even the Chinese, although they don’t use cutlery, use their chopsticks because they don’t want their hands to get dirty and be ridiculed. (De Castro 1938: 55–56)

Domesticating subjects under the American empire

Speed, convenience and efficiency became the most pronounced food legacy of American colonial rule. With the ratification of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, the scope of industrialization extended beyond American shores and the Philippines became an instant market of surplus goods. Breakfast cereals, oatmeal, milk, cocoa, cheese and soft drinks topped a kilometric list of products that were brought into the Philippines, and many of them benefitted from having labels that exaggerated their nutritional merits, freshness and taste. The idea of food in cans and bottles – which not only shortened cooking times but also human contact – provided the opportunity to reproduce the backwardness of the Filipino. At first, these products were not readily embraced in the Philippines and attracted a lot of criticism. They were hardly accessible and proved too expensive for many Filipinos so that their utilization became symbols of class and were concentrated in well-to-do households who adopted such tastes. Depictions of excessiveness and gluttony appeared as early as 1900. Sta. Maria points to an example from the magazine The Excelsior which featured an editorial cartoon that ‘poked fun at the food-focused culture that had evolved among upper class Manilans’ (2006: 24). Satirizing the excessiveness and gullibility of the upper class who bought into what was perceived as just another American fad, the cartoon depicted a rich and obese little boy gnawing what appears to be either a turkey or large chicken leg, flanked by three elder women and a dining table filled with a huge spread of food in the background.

The negative stigma was not to last as the United States countered popular opinion with a barrage of propaganda materials that meant to correct perceptions about the new culture they were trying to implement through textbooks utilized in public and private schools, as well as numerous other books and pamphlets that were distributed to religious congregations, markets and other public spaces. Manufactured by the government and private enterprises alike, these manuals covered a wide variety of topics such as grammar fundamentals, public speaking, Christian values and US history. Food was one of the most popular topics and often intersected with issues of health, nutrition and hygiene. By this time, a new form of consternation was passed on to local practice. Science became the rationalizing lens that asserted the ascendancy of American food and rationalized values such as speed, efficiency, practicality and the ability to contribute more to society. It engendered food practice, assigning power of domestic food production to women, and used this to assert their contributions to society. It is in this rhetoric where American colonization will figure prominently in changing perceptions about public kitchens. By championing the productivity of individuals and their contributions to society, food’s significance had been elevated anew to embrace purpose and functions that were attuned to the incorporation of healthy individuals within a properly functioning society.

The American occupation of the Philippines that started in 1898 only reinforced negative attitudes towards public eating even further. US policies affecting domestication of the colony strived to elevate the importance of hygiene and sanitation in the new tropical frontier. Viewing the climate and environment of the Philippines with malevolence and disgust, the newly formed Philippine Commission, a body comprised of appointees by US President William McKinley, established the Bureau of Government Laboratories in 1901 which intended to make available ‘adequate facilities for investigation into, and scientific report upon, the causes, pathology and methods of diagnosing and combating the diseases of man and of domesticated animals’ (cited in Anderson 2007: 111). Arnold used the term ‘tropicality’ to describe the process of essentializing the differences between the northern hemisphere and the tropics through ‘a far more elaborate and scientifically informed sense of the otherness of the tropics’ that has been ‘derived far more from external than indigenous discourses’ (1998: 6). Probing the issues of disease and acclimatization, the subscription to Philippine tropicality reasserted American imperialism further. The United States asserted its authority by configuring the Philippines as its ecological other, constructing and construing the local environment as one that needed to be emancipated from disease. Using science as the basis for its rhetoric, it confronted the peculiarity of disease as a crucial hurdle in asserting its civilizing influence.

Unable to engage the environment directly, food and kitchens became a critical site in the United States’ attempts to construct a model for modernity. It was small enough to contain, but its pervasiveness in many activities of the day provided a practical laboratory and classroom for installing US operations in the Philippines. From a military standpoint, domestication was a means to confront rising mortality rates of American soldiers in the country. Doctors and scientists fixated on pathological deficiencies that emasculated their civilizing agents to the Philippines who became stricken with diseases like malaria and leprosy. Then infliction of a hypermasculine set of scientific, medical and nutritional programs through domestication guaranteed the continued influx of American servicemen whose masculinity was threatened by a disease-stricken colony. Politically, it provided a basis for assuaging American guilt over their involvement in imperial activities over Spain’s former colonies. Their construction as infantile and unhygienic subjects strengthened pervasive views of the Filipinos’ inability to govern themselves. Likewise, these efforts resulted in racialized concepts of health, constructing the foreign body’s purity as an antigen that needs to be reproduced in order to combat the local body seen as the threatening source of contamination. ‘Filipinos of every grade are sworn enemies of sanitation’, wrote an American doctor who was stationed in the country, and it was hoped that ‘these defects and others will be remedied, however, when American ideas are disseminated’ (Devins 1905: 108). Surveillance and instruction intensified, and American efforts to rationalize the many specimens of disease and malady that they encountered in the tropics amplified further the cultural dislocation dividing the empire and colony. The use of science to probe infectious organisms and contaminants only magnified the superiority of American life as the yardstick of progress that had yet to be achieved by the Philippines.

This division could not be any less obvious than in the manner Americans looked at food. A 1922 cookbook entitled Good Cooking and Health in the Tropics stated that:

Food is often dangerous in the Tropics because the domestic servants who handle it may be carriers of disease. In the past it has been the custom in Manila to examine all food-handlers before they were permitted to work in public eating establishments. In places in which there is no assurance that that has been done, it is safest to depend only on foods which have been cooked and are served hot. (Gaches 1922: 300–301)

Aside from providing a foundry for casting principles of sanitation, food became representational of a rising sensibility on collective organization and purpose. Hygiene was just a means to achieve the more important goal of feeding the entire population, and the principle became jargon for the period that saw domestic functions being streamlined. At the core of this streamlining process is highlighting the importance of using modern cooking techniques to produce the healthiest eating options as a critical attribute determining a woman’s position in society. The decisions housewives and mothers made with regard to food were believed to be the foundation for developing healthy and productive citizens, and the period was bombarded with images in cookbooks, advertising and media of what the new modern Filipina was supposed to be. Donning traditional Spanish dresses while working modern cooking equipment, her traditional persona of subservience and piety had been upgraded to include that of a knowledgeable house manager who added up the nutritional values of different food items and condensed hours of work into more efficient processes through the use of new tools and processed ingredients.

Containing colonial bodies

The three decades of US rule saw the proliferation of images of healthy individuals populating a well-oiled society. By the 1930s, food advertisements had not only begun to shed traditional Filipino outfits in place of more contemporary and functional clothing, but also became significantly racialized through the employment of Western bodies as vessels of modern life. Much of the advertising from this era consisted of re-purposed advertising materials of American companies that featured white families, or, in some instances, locally produced ads adapting the syntax of their American predecessors using images of mestizo Filipino families. These ads portrayed the mother and housewife as well as her spouse and children as deeply ingrained with the functions and activities of the Western family. Women wore modern clothes and performed cooking tasks in far less time with far better results using the knowledge emanating from the laboratories and the classroom. They served their food to their happy, healthy and active children whose enthusiastic faces not only indicated their satisfaction with the food but also enhanced their potential through activities that, according to a Quaker Oats ad that populated newspapers and magazines, they performed with ‘life and vitality, [and] never sick or cross’.

The omission of the traditional imagery of the Filipino in favor of Western bodies rejuvenated aversions towards activities that dealt directly with food production in favor of consumption. The overtly racialized depictions of Filipinos reconstructed the functions of food anew and aligned it not just with productivity and efficiency but also with different forms of play and leisure. Connecting food to ideas of pleasure in this manner reified the past as the point of departure for the modern ways associated with new food practices. Food generalized the passage from peasant affliction characteristic of the old feudal enterprise and into the era of a capitalist order, thus facilitating the mass reception of a rigid set of ideals that positioned the importance of American domesticity in both the home and the state. The purity of race became synonymous with the purity and desirability of class. The processed, pre-packed, preserved, time-saving and branded foods introduced by the United States made explicit the new social organization that was beginning to modify the colony. The ability to purchase these commodities clarified one’s social standing, thereby transforming a horde of canned goods, restaurant dishes and kitchen appliances into desirable symbols that enhanced and modernized privilege and control. The stocking of pantries and fitting of kitchens with modern appliances effectively fortified private from public space. Binding the confines of the home into exclusivity, the once fluid kinship and communal ties that were in place in the precolonial Philippines had been rendered rigid by the need to protect merchandise stored at home.

The promise of leisure lured many Filipinos into adopting the changes brought about by American occupation and was complemented eventually by the significant rise of entertainment venues, shops and restaurants. Their presence not only signaled dramatic changes in the manner and customs of eating but also solidified the arrival of an emergent middle class who brandished their ability to dine out and navigate the different customs demanded by the new spaces of urban life. Dining out in public, however, was just as, if not more, guarded as eating at home in the confines of modern kitchens and well-stocked pantries. As more and more restaurants sold the promises of modern living, communal meals in public kitchens became a repository of the nightmare that was agricultural labor. In defining privilege and social mobility, restaurants also erected the national image through constant juxtapositions of local food with the foreign. The increased number of frozen, preserved and processed foodstuffs stretched the repertoire of the national cuisine to satiate the needs for upper class distinction and identity. Some were downright obscure, utilizing ingredients that were hard to source such as French-derived turkey poults appearing in the pre-Second World War diaries of Pacita Zamora. Many, however, were guaranteed safe entry into the national cuisine due primarily to the multitude of products sold to cook them. Spaghetti, for instance, despite being of Italian origins, found its way onto local tables, demonstrating the muscle of industrial production whose canned tomato sauce, bottled catsup, frozen hotdogs and processed cheese have become ordinary staples in the middle class Filipino pantry. These products did not only promise efficiency, they also minimized handling times and, therefore, the risk of contamination. By expanding its scope to embrace influences from overseas, the American occupation transformed Philippine food into what Doreen Fernandez has described as ‘Spam culture’ (2000: 58), one that has favored processed over fresh food. This has had searing implications for food production and consumption. In search of foreign flavors, the Philippines exported their best produce, opting instead to purchase excess American imports in cans and bottles. At the same time, such consumption choices have reiterated convenience, speed and purpose, as well as mimicking health and nutrition slogans that have become, as far as food is concerned, one of the lasting legacies of US imperialism.

Marshaling both product and upper-class consumer identities inward into the sheltered domains of private space also simultaneously pushed the efforts and lifestyles of laboring classes further into the periphery. Their limited representation in the spectacles of visual advertising has not only alienated them from the whiteness and purity of the home where these products are situated, but has also effectively censured their history and ways of life from the nation being constituted through these homes. In this regard, images of the lower classes were to be affixed to advertisements for alcohol and other vices like tobacco, thus reinforcing existing stereotypes about the backwardness of non-modern lives.

Alcohol, in particular, has always been a litigious commodity, even during the Spanish occupation. Spaniards have made conflicting assessments of Filipinos and their consumption of alcohol. From the very start, they were convinced that ‘natives sustain life by eating little and drinking much – so heavily that it is a marvel if they are not drunk all the time, or at least from noon on’ (cited in Alegre 1992: 13). However, the stereotype did not translate to liquor sales. Bowled over at how Filipinos did not drink as much as the subjects in their colonies in the New World, Spanish bureaucrat Tomás de Comyn recommended more festive gatherings after reporting that the Filipino was ‘by nature sober so that the spectacle of the drunken man is seldom noticed’ (cited in Sta. Maria 2006: 175). The American period saw the continuing struggle to bolster the sales of alcohol by targeting the lower class, reproducing stereotypes of drunkenness and carefree attitudes towards work. Alcoholic print ads situated the peasant body out in the fields, and they were often depicted turning to drink in order to relax while stealing moments away from or after work. The marketing of alcohol re-purposed peasant bodies into a commodified cultural sign and constructed their lives around work. It laid emphasis on alcohol’s dual purpose of fueling the body and the prize that one can look forward to after a day’s labor, thus resuscitating old Spanish functions for the fiesta. However, this time the celebratory character of peasant drinking reinforced existing ideals of consumerism. Displacing peasant bodies from the sheltered environment of the home and tying their identities to work romanticized their subservient position in a structure dominated by the cultural sensibility emphasizing the exclusivity and seclusion of upper-class leisure.

Ironically, the same dichotomous relationship that has pushed private and public space further away from each other has also provided a logic that blurs the boundaries between them. As commodification strived to confirm drinking as a social activity performed in public, it has also provided a venue that has allowed for the reproduction of the public kitchen and communal meals. ‘Drinking goes on in all our islands’, writes Alegre, whose anthropological survey of alcohol consumption in the archipelago has come attached with the need to study it alongside food and interactions: ‘where there is drinking there is almost always food that accompanies it – and the most normal way is not to drink alone, i.e. it is a social act’ (1992: 13). The social aspect of alcohol manifests in an old Filipino custom referred to as tagay, the common Filipino term for the sharing of drinks which Alegre describes as a process whereby individuals learn to look beyond their own interests and where ‘sharing becomes the norm and giving the rule’ (1992: 15). This context of drinking has not only dissolved the physical and symbolic barricades that obstruct social interactions from taking place, it has also served as an archive for a set of dishes that clearly have no place in the rigid confines of private dining spaces. Collectively referred to as pulutan, these accompaniments featured:

A little of the past … But something new: a different pulutan. And if one is lucky, a bit of the future, something untried: kinilaw na balat ng baboy [pork rind ceviche], inihaw na baby eel [grilled baby eel], indigenized sashimi. Pulutan democratizes: all is possible – locust, kamias [ginger lily], sea cucumber, newly born mice ([from] Paombong, Bulacan), goat’s penis and balls (called bat and ball in Cuenca, Batangas). Plant, insect, animal – all of the digestible in the living world. Pulutan reaches out, explores, opens horizons as the drink anchors one to the familiar. (Alegre 1992: 15)

The ambiguity between public and private kitchens is most emblematic in the manner Philippine domestic architecture has accommodated old remnants of privilege in the design of the kitchen. The kitchen’s compartmentalization has been confounded further by the inclusion of what Filipinos refer to as the ‘dirty kitchen’ in more affluent households. Often located out in the backyard or in the least visible part of the house, the dirty kitchen replicates old attitudes about class and privilege by making distinctions between the kinds of work deemed acceptable in the sheltered confines and protected commodities of the main kitchen, which houses the best equipment, fixtures and furnishings that the homeowner can afford. The brunt of the work is dispensed to the dirty kitchen, leaving the main kitchen as a showpiece for guests to display the cleanliness and management skills of the homeowner. Normally assigning the dirty kitchen as the househelp’s domain, the ease or difficulty in which everyday tasks are performed amplifies the social divisions between homeowner and servant. Because the cost of labor for help with domestic tasks is relatively lower compared to the cost of utilities and the investments made in staging a ‘clean kitchen’, domestic workers were often seen as incapable and unworthy of working in the main kitchen even though they were expected to bolster the position of their employers’ family in society.

The erasure of public kitchens

By the end of American occupation in 1946, Philippine cuisine had evolved into a congregation of activities that effectively coerced public life into molding itself to the desire of powerful private entities. Armed with well-stocked and fully-fitted kitchens, domesticity translated hegemonic ideals from the state into the home, thus reinforcing the privilege of identities that conformed to white consumerist American modernities of partitioned houses and gated communities. Their influence rippled beyond their own food choices, and often the rationality that accompanied these decisions expressed the need to maintain, if not improve, their standing in society.

On the other hand, the physical and imagined spaces for the public have been reduced significantly. The clamor for land reform has been a persistent problem in allocating space for enacting any intervention oriented towards feeding the public. Just as they were during the Spanish period, many Filipino laborers are left to fend for themselves, often forced to survive on what I consider as industrial waste. The manner in which the lower classes have subsisted is perplexingly inventive. They have made so much out of processed goods since the United States started to throw canned food in the Philippines’ direction to make more profits out of products that would have been scrapped anyway. Even the most expensive of restaurants now would find it acceptable to charge more than a day’s official minimum wage for a dish whose main ingredients came out of a can. The same can be said of the disposable parts of animals and plants of products that were once deemed unfit for supermarket shelves. They have always ended up being peddled as street food or cooked as pulutan, intensifying the pathological stigma associated with them. And yet, when money can be made out of these supposedly unsanitary fares, they are readily stocked in supermarkets and kitchen pantries to be absorbed into the diets of the upper class.

Likewise, interrogating the absence or erasure of the public kitchen draws attention to the manner in which public and private spaces are imagined. The idea of a national cuisine – one that supposedly represents the culture and way of life of a significant majority – presents an ironic misrepresentation of the way the public actually eats. It reduces the collective identity into a prescriptive list of dishes whose politics and history are conveniently diluted in order to make the appropriation of modern life as simple and uncomplicated as possible. While modern life may have reached the private kitchen through processed foods and modern machinery, its impact on the collective life of the nation remains skewed by the illusion of progress and development that has yet to find its way outside of the sterile and fortified confines of the kitchen.

The increasing marginalization of public kitchens is not just a cultural issue but is also an economic one. Public kitchens have helped in feeding the nation and have proven significant in the local economy. In 2010, the World Bank estimated that 40 percent of the Philippines’ GDP came from the underground economy. Philippine economist Cielito Habito in 2005 pegged it higher at 53 percent, stating that these numbers could actually be higher still if one also considers untaxed and therefore unmonitored agricultural laborers. Likewise, data from the National Statistics Office show that 835,729 unaccounted enterprises surveyed in 1988 had a total value-added contribution of $376 million to the economy, which was 65 percent of the total value-added contribution of the retail trade sector. Whatever sum of numbers make more sense, all reports agree that the biggest chunks of those percentages come from the invisible and unreported transactions of street food vendors who have, time and again, helped fend off unemployment and have fed the population during stringent times. Despite the positive contributions of public kitchens, there haven’t been any real interventions that define their place in society and distinguish them from other players involved in illicit activities in the underground economy. The informality surrounding food production in the Philippines has only led to a self-perpetuating dynamic that has confined many laborers in subscale, low-productivity and inefficient work.