Civilization via Chiffon Cake: American Colonial Education and Food
At the center of the American colonial regime was a national public school system, with its goal of shaping loyal servants of the empire under the premise of preparation for eventual self-rule. As scholar Alex Orquiza notes in chapter 8 of this book, free public school for girls in the Philippines sought to civi- lize them through a curriculum of domestic science courses, which required girls to adopt white, middle-class gender roles and learn American cooking and baking, knitting, sewing, and household hygiene and sanitation. Domestic science was central to the colonial project and its civilizing mission. “That to have good government we must first have good people; that in order to have good people we must first have good homes,” wrote Alice Magoon, a teacher charged with drawing up the domestic science curriculum in Zambales in 1902.26 Domestic science (later called home economics) was a nineteenth- and twentieth-century movement of white middle-class women who sought to professionalize the domestic sphere by applying the scientific and managerial techniques of modern industrialization to domestic labors.27
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In every town, domestic science buildings were erected.28 Camila Labor Carido remembers bitterly how domestic science and pressure to conform to gender roles, instead of reading and arithmetic, dominated her education. “We are not educated,” she remembered angrily.
We go to school [only] to learn how to write [our] name. You are prepared [only] to take care of your husband and your children. We are just taught how to be a good wife, darn and sew, cook for your husband. That’s our life in the Phil- ippines, to serve your husband even if he kills you for not doing it.29
If Filipina/o bodies were deemed racially inferior to American ones, so too were their native foods. Students were taught the nutritional superiority of refined sugars, red meats like beef, animal fats, hydrogenated fats like short- enings, and highly processed foods. As a result, American food was increas- ingly seen as “hygienic, practical, and ‘modern,’ fit for the new generation,” explains Doreen Fernandez.30 Moreover, the students were instructed to eat three square meals (and avoid merienda, or afternoon snacks), use forks and spoons, and end the traditional practice of eating with their hands.31 In agri- culture classes, teachers pressed students to abandon crops thought inferior to American varieties.32 As Orquiza contends in chapter 8, a combination of domestic science curricula and the marketing of American corporations like Nestlé, Lea & Perrins, and Heinz encouraged a generation of Filipinos to crave canned products such as corned beef and SPAM, white bread, pies, chiffon cakes, cookies and biscuits, salads made of American canned fruit, and may- onnaise-slathered macaroni salads. But few Filipinas/os could afford canned Dole fruit, Nestlé condensed milk, and a freezer for “Frozen Pampanga Fruit Salad”; or gas ovens, imported nuts, dates, and cracker meal for a cookie called “Food for the Gods,” both of which were popularized by Culinary Arts in the Tropics (published in 1922 by the wives of American colonial officials).33 None- theless, the domestic science curricula and American advertising made an indelible impression on young Filipinas/os by portraying life in America as a paradise in which macaroni chicken salads, steaks, biscuits, pies, cakes, and frozen fruit salad were abundant. Such a country must have seemed irresist- ibly delicious.