A New Way of Understanding Food
American public schools transformed Philippine daily life. They introduced lessons in civics, self-government, and vocational training and, most nota- bly, made English the national language. American teachers, confident that their new curriculum was a vast improvement over the Catholic educational system of the Spanish period, brought lessons in nutrition, hygiene, and agriculture.
The 1929 publication A Tentative Guide for Health Education in Elemen- tary Schools demonstrates the new importance of food instruction in its lists of the yearly objectives of food instruction for teachers from grades 1 through 6. Grade 1 students were to learn the greater nutritional benefits of imported canned condensed milk than those of carabao (buffalo) milk and the superiority of Western whole grains to rice. Grade 2’s lessons stressed etiquette: eating slowly, sitting down while chewing, and chewing one’s food thoroughly. Grade 3 taught students how to identify foods that strength- ened bones and teeth, and grade 4 focused on memorizing the nutritional value of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and milk. Grade 4 also advocated the elimination of merienda, or midday snacks between meals. Grades 5 and 6 targeted hygiene, with lessons on protecting food from dirt and flies, the use of clean individual drinking cups, and consuming water for proper digestion.6
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After grade 6, food instruction was divided by gender. Girls trained in kitchens and boys trained on farms. Alice Fuller’s Housekeeping: A Textbook for Girls in Public Intermediate Schools of the Philippines lists the recipes that girls in middle school were required to learn, such as hot cakes, corn bread, muffins, biscuits, drop sponge cakes, jelly rolls, doughnuts, and cookies. University home economics and domestic science classes standardized food instruction even further. The Philippine Normal School, the country’s teachers college, required all female students, regardless of major, to take three semes- ters of domestic science, one year of botany with an emphasis on food values, one year of physiology with an emphasis on female hygiene, and one year of domestic science.7 All female students at the University of the Philippines took two courses on the principles of cooking, nutrition, home arts, and citizen- ship training. The university’s general catalog even listed a course devoted to “the intelligent selection of imported goods as well as those locally produced.”8 Food thus was an integral part of a female student’s education.
Filipino boys studied how to farm and export cash crops like sugar, tobacco, and coconuts. Schools like the Silliman Institute in Dumaguete tailored their instruction to specific regions and climates so seventh-grade boys could spe- cialize in the culture and care of papayas, bananas, pomelos, oranges, lem- ons, Chico cacao, and tobacco.9 Their textbooks praise farmers and under- score their importance to the nation’s future. Edwin Bingham Copeland, the director of agriculture for the public schools, wrote in his textbook Elements of Philippine Agriculture that Filipino boys studying agriculture were “not only preparing themselves for the most general industry of these islands, but are helping by their work, in school after school, in the uplifting of their peo- ple.” Copeland urged Filipino students to study hard and surpass Hawai‘i in sugar and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in coconut production.10 Another school that focused on farming was the Central Luzon Agricultural School in Muñoz, the 658-hectare home to 1,038 students who ran their own movie house, sawmill, general store, bank, and printing press. Profits from these student-run busi- nesses paid for a local granary, gardens, and poultry and hog projects. The Philippine government tried to replicate Central Luzon’s success with new campuses in Mountain Province, Camarines Sur, Samar, Abra, and Palawan. In addition, it created 272 rural high schools, fourteen farm schools, and 274 settlement farm schools.
The public schools changed more than just how food was prepared and produced. American educators credited them for creating a Philippine mid- dle class with new tastes and preferences for consumer goods. As M. E. Polley wrote in 1929,
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Education has created in the large middle class desires for comforts, luxuries, and pleasures of modern life far in excess of the desires for these blessings among the upper class two decades ago, and they are satisfying those desires by wearing better clothing, eating better food, living in better and more sanitary homes, having more diversions, traveling more and with better means of trans- portation, and giving their children better education.11
Thus, a range of imported products entered the country, and advertisers culti- vated the Filipino consumer desire for new goods.