As American As Buko Pie: Progressive Food Reform in the Colonial Philippines, 1901–16

Assessing a decade and a half of American rule in the Philippines, Norbert Lyons, editor of the Manila Bulletin, concluded that benevolent American schoolteachers had successfully initiated an unprecedented process of “altruistic regeneration.” Central to “regeneration” was the transformation of the Philippine diet from “rice and fish” to “meat and potatoes” Regeneration, an idea predicated on colonial violence, however, was strictly an idea. Filipinos were unwilling to wholeheartedly accept American tastes, and, as the papers of American schoolteachers reveal, the agents of “regeneration” were cast into student roles. This paper analyzes American and Philippine clashes over taste, and the larger issue of identity, taking place within the schoolroom. While vegetable seeds imported from the United States for use in Philippine school gardens often failed to take root, Filipino children and their parents rejected staple elements of the American diet, particularly corn, as unfit for human consumption. American schoolteachers, in turn, were forced to adapt their recipes, consequently altering their association between food and morality, lest they suffer complete irrelevance. Though promoters of the American project in the Philippines boasted of the ability of Filipinos to Americanize to domestic audiences, the cookbooks created in the Philippine classroom blended American recipes with Filipino tastes and local produce, creating what American teachers termed a “new Philippine food.” Cooking and corn growing contests, “bake-offs,” and traveling exhibitions promoted this cuisine, the most tangible outcome of which is the Buko Pie of the Laguna Province, an American-style piecrust filled with young coconut. The paper briefly concludes with an exploration of contemporary food discourse in the Philippines. The Progressive association between “fitness for independence” and the possession of a “national cuisine” laid the basis by which contemporary Philippine dishes are assessed according to their “authenticity,” that is whether they are Chinese, Malay, or Spanish in origin.