PAGKAING PINOY, PANLASANG PANDAIGDIG:

THE GLOBALIZATION OF FILIPINO FOODWAYS FROM THE

MANILA GALLEON TRADE TO JOLLIBEE

DAVID GOWEY

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

Abstract:​ Scholars have paid much attention to ideological and political impacts of the Spanish
conquest of the Philippines such as conversion to Catholicism, suppression of Islam, and
reconcentrations that caused lasting changes in Filipino settlement patterns and social
organization. Perhaps even more apparent but less-discussed are the changes in Filipino
foodways that resulted from the Manila Galleon Trade with Mexico. American products like
chocolate, avocados, potatoes, tomatoes, maize, peanuts, papaya, chayote, and squashes spread
throughout the Philippines and beyond, introducing new tastes and ingredients across Asia that
are now iconic elements of numerous regional cuisines. At the same time, Spanish observers
gave familiar Spanish names to unfamiliar Filipino foods and methods of cooking: adobo, arroz
caldo, estofado, longaniza, and more. While all of these foods are undeniably Filipino now, they
also reflect the Spanish Philippines’ status as a metropolitan hub of intercontinental commerce
that brought together not only the empire but the global economy at large. This paper explores
some of the ways in which Filipino foodways were shaped by Spanish colonization while
Filipinos in turn also shaped the products of the empire to meet local needs and demands as fully
realized economic agents.

Keywords:​ Manila-Acapulco galleon trade; food; practice theory; globalization; ethnomedicine;

colonialism; agency

INTRODUCTION

Braving a three-hour wait outdoors in the middle of winter, hundreds of expectant diners

(myself included) marked an important occasion for the Filipino community in Arizona: the

grand opening of the state’s first Jollibee franchise on December 28th, 2019. Almost everyone in

line appeared to be Filipino or else accompanied by someone who was, many conversing

excitedly in Tagalog, English, or Taglish about menu items they wished to order, catching up

with friends and relatives, and other topics of everyday conversation. One of these that also

occurred to me as I stood in the drive-thru lane chatting on Facebook Messenger with friends in

the Philippines was the convenience of the new location. Previously, the nearest Jollibee

franchises to Arizona had been in Nevada and Southern California, both with much larger

Filipino communities than Chandler. While the line to get inside on the first day was long

enough to deter all but the most dedicated, my later trips—a 20-minute drive on residential

1
streets as opposed to 6-8 hours on the freeway across state lines—saw the initial frenzy of grand

opening diminished enough that more curious white customers entered as well.

While my purpose in going was not strictly speaking ethnographic, I did make an effort

to observe these white American encounters with Filipino food and on several occasions found

myself participating in them as well. Because of what I can only assume was a sense of

familiarity upon seeing another co-ethnic among the overwhelmingly Filipino clientele, several

times I had white customers approach me directly with questions: if I had eaten here before, what

kind of food is it, what is Filipino food, is it spicy, what items I would recommend, etc. Central

to one such experience in particular was the irony that with the notable exception of pancit

palabok and adobo rice, nearly every other menu item was recognizably American. Different

groups of immigrants brought dishes like hamburgers, fried chicken, and spaghetti to the United

States, where they were subjected to further innovations in production and distribution such that

they were then made ready for export outside of individual immigrant enclaves and eventually all

around the world. Each iteration brought with it further adjustments for regional tastes, available

ingredients, and other socioeconomic forces, such that eventually they could come back in a

familiar-but-unfamiliar form.

In this sense, the opening of a Filipino chain restaurant serving Filipinized American food

in a part of the former Spanish (and current American) Empire while Mexican pop music played

on the radio is not a historical oddity at all. Rather, it is one of many microcosmic expressions of

the Atlantic and Pacific trades brought about by European desires for both exotic commodities

and the coerced labor needed to produce it at marketable prices and quantities for domestic

consumption. The arrival of Spanish (among other Europeans, including Portuguese, Flemish,

2
English, Dutch, and Florentine) merchants in Manila and establishment of trans-Pacific trade

with Acapulco entailed the addition of only one more connection into a centuries-old system of

maritime commerce that already connected East Asia to Europe. Previously these trade routes

provided the peoples of the Philippine Islands with access to goods from throughout the region

and beyond, including Indian textiles, Moluccan spices, Chinese and Vietnamese porcelains, and

lacquered furniture from Japan and the Southeast Asian mainland, which European traders also

sought for their own markets. As Barbara Andaya (1997:395) argued of Southeast Asia in

general, “knowledge of the outside was not due to an ‘age of discovery,’ but to an intimate

involvement with international trade which stretched back over hundreds of years.” The

historical and cultural contexts within which the many ethnolinguistic groups and political

formations that made up the Philippines interacted with foreign trade from the time of Spanish

contact through the colonial period should be understood in the same light.

While colonization did result in changes to foodways among many other cultural

practices, viewing these changes only as Spanish impositions without consideration for local

uses by Filipinos within the colony would erase the agency exercised by the colonized who

actively shaped their diets to accommodate or resist imperialism just as they did their religious,

linguistic, economic, and settlement practices as well. Specifically, Filipinos by and large

adapted their various foodways to the introduction of New World crops to incorporate imported

goods, though in ways that aligned with Filipino rather than foreign epistemologies and

categorizations. As a collection of practices, tastes, and symbols, food is a critical component of

identity, whether personal, ethnic, political, religious, socioeconomic, gender, regional, national,

etc. This paper argues that an analysis of the reception of American subsistence crops in the

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Philippines offers an agentive lens for imagining larger forces of globalization and colonialism in

ways that center local interactions rather than those of foreigners and/or elites. In doing so, I

suggest that this lens is instructive about historical as well as contemporary food practices, while

also looking forward to the future integration of Filipino food into global cuisines over time.

METHODOLOGY

Within the broader contexts of Southeast Asian trade and contemporary globalization, the

Philippines has long been a site for culinary and other cultural innovations. The archipelago’s

place along sailing routes that connect both the Spice Islands and the Americas to the Asian

mainland centered exchanges of silver, crops, people, and ideas on ports such as Manila, Iloilo,

and Cebu, involving merchants from all over the region and beyond. Between these many

competing motivations and cultural systems, that of the Filipinos themselves who participated in

these exchanges—as sailors, agricultural workers, consumers, etc.—must take a central place in

an analysis of how New World crops were received by Filipinos, or in other words what

meanings and uses these products accumulated over time. Rather than viewing these products as

merely Spanish introductions that were accepted without question for their nutritive or prestige

value, an agentive view seeks to place them in dialogue with the many Filipino actors of various

ethnolinguistic groups who shaped how these foods would be used.

A non-agentive model that this paper rejects for predicting how Filipinos received these

new foods might assert that each was treated as a prestige good associated with and consumed by

primarily Spanish and Filipino elites, much in the same way that Chinese porcelains, gongs, or

Japanese lacquerwares appear in historical records of Philippine maritime trade. Certainly,

prestige plays a part in new food introduction not only in the Philippines but worldwide. Elite

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Spanish ladies of the colonial period sent each other Mexican chocolates as souvenirs much as

we do now,1 and fast food restaurants considered low class, dirty, or unhealthy in the United

States like McDonald’s take on new connotations of Americanness, modernity, and global

connectedness abroad.2 However, this paper takes an approach closer to Ortner’s (1984) practice

theory by way of Acabado (2018) as well as Mintz’s (1985) analysis of sugar consumption to ask

a different set of questions. How did Filipinos receive New World foods and incorporate them

into diets and local “econom[ies] of cultural goods” as Bourdieu (1984) describes? What were

some of the socioeconomic conditions that contributed to the acceptance of some New World

crops and not others, and in the quantities and roles in which they were accepted? What might an

analysis of globalization look like that focuses on “Filipino food” as both a nationally

constructed set of symbols and an internally heterogeneous collection of dietary practices with

medicinal, nutritive, and social justifications? In using an agentive model of new food

introduction in the Philippines, I intend to place local/indigenous categories at the forefront of

analysis and proceed from there to explanatory hypotheses.

NEW FOODS LITERATURE

Literature on the introduction of new foods is expansive and so only a portion can be

discussed in the present paper. In citing Bourdieu (1984) here in conjunction with Mintz (1995),

I refer to ​taste​ in both the literal sense of food preferences and the figurative sense of culinary

ideology as a particular aesthetic ethos. At the most basic level, culinary ideology determines

what substances are considered edible or inedible, what counts as food or nonfood, just as the

physical acts of “cooking and eating together operationalise the structure, content and

1
Gasch-Tomas 2019.
2
Watson 2006.

5
combinatorial ideas of ‘meals’ and their components” (Messer 1997:55). Out of this seeming

binary—only seeming because this distinction is made at so many different levels from the

individual up to the societal that disagreements of some kind can be expected at every

point—emerge still further distinctions of who may eat what, for which reasons, and under what

circumstances.3 Taste, then, is illustrative of many aspects of individual and collective identities

when analyzed as an expression of such identity markers as class, gender, religion, nationality,

ethnicity, residence, or age.4 Introduction of new foods may highlight these power dynamics

even further as they enter a given society and become accessible to multiple classes or else

remain prestige goods only accessible by elites. At the same time, neither a state of scarcity nor

prestige is necessarily permanent. Especially within the context of global capitalism, the

potential for increased profits incentivizes the discovery and creation of new markets, leading to

more widespread adoption of products once reserved for only the wealthiest and most

cosmopolitan consumers.

A review of literature on new foods thus has to account for both capitalist and

non-capitalist socioeconomic systems, where considerations such as wealth and prestige must

also be balanced against subsistence. In proto-capitalist and capitalist contexts, introduction

processes could still favor staples such as potatoes5 or rice6 but also more prestigious foods like

sushi.7 Wiessner (2005) and Wiessner and Tumu (1998) demonstrate that differences in

settlement and subsistence patterns had deep impacts on the acceptance of sweet potatoes

3
See Douglas 1966; Harris 1987; Lévi-Strauss 1964; Grew 1999; Mintz and Du Bois 2002.
4
As Utami (2018) argues, food’s ability to represent so many types and aspects of identity makes it a form
of cross-cultural communication.
5
Nunn and Qian 2010; Cook 2013.
6
Carney 2001.
7
Bestor 2005.

6
variously as a staple crop; symbol of feminine productive and reproductive ability; trade good

crucial for forming multicultural exchange networks; and means of generating prowess through

redistribution feasts. Boomgaard (2003) reports a similar conclusion that across colonial

Indonesia, the ability of sweet potatoes, cassava, and maize to mitigate famine with comparably

less labor or poorer growing conditions than rice led to their wide acceptance among lowlanders

and uplanders alike, even as rice was afforded more prestige in regions where it predominated. In

China, where a series of land reforms under the Song, Manchu, and Ming dynasties gave

increasingly greater influence to smaller landowners instead of large gentry estates, sweet

potatoes and maize contributed to what Mazumdar (1999) termed a second great agricultural

revolution. Furthermore, capitalism brought with it new incentives to boost cash crop production

in order to supply increasingly global markets and consumers, thus financing colonial

enterprises, acting as status symbols for the mercantile elite, and in some cases gradually

reaching the lower classes in the metropole as culinary markers of national identity. Under

globalization, this concept is taken further still by the growth of international brands, which are

seen to export not only food but images of social class, cosmopolitanism, or Americanness.8

Mintz (1985 and 1995) is also helpful here for his analysis of socioeconomic factors that

contributed to the growth of sugar-eating in Britain and its colonies. While certain market

conditions were vastly different in the colonial Philippines—namely the comparative absence of

African chattel slavery as a means of production and ownership of vast agricultural lands by the

Roman Catholic Church rather than by privately funded mercantilist/proto-capitalist

entrepreneurs—his conclusions here serve as both a contrastive case and methodological

8
Watson 2006.

7
exemplar. For example, a sizable number of the New World crops brought to the Philippines via

the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade did not enter as plantation cash crops like sugar but rather

staples: potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and cassava. Further inquiry into the adoption of

non-staples like tomatoes, squashes, beans, and other fruits like avocados and pineapples is

predicated on the socioeconomic conditions and culinary ideologies into which they entered.9

After Comaroff and Comaroff (1991:24), culinary ideology is here defined as the sets of

attitudes, associations, practices, and other behaviors that construct the social roles of food

within a given cultural group or context such as religious dietary laws, gendered prohibitions on

consumption of particular foods, food as an index of economic status, etc. This paper will focus

on New World crops in the context of the galleon trade and subsequent socioeconomic changes

brought about by colonial polices such as ​encomienda​ and cash-cropping.

“FILIPINO” FOOD(S)

An important caveat before moving forward is that a discussion of what constitutes

‘Filipino food’ is necessarily less a hegemonic canon of universal recipes and styles than it is a

term inclusive of many different foodways. While certain dishes like adobo and sinigang have

gained national or international renown, even these vary widely depending on region, ingredients

on-hand, family tradition, and individual taste. The many regional cuisines that collectively make

up Filipino food were each historically dependent on such factors as local resources, access to

trade goods, religious dietary restrictions, seasons, and technologies— wet-rice vs dry-rice

cultivation, fishing tools and techniques, etc.—and each has been subject to change over time.10

9
Fernandez (1997:187) notes that avocados were introduced from Hawaii by American horticulturalist
William S. Lyon in 1903.
10
Or rapidly, as in the case of the Ifugao rice terraces around Kiangan, which Acabado (2018) argues were
only begun after intensive migration of lowland Ifugao wet-rice planters into the region between 1571-1650 CE to
escape from Spanish colonization.

8
In this way, the adoption of New World crops into Filipino diets would not have naturally

homogenized regional cuisines into a monolithic national one.

Rather, Appadurai (1988) and Mintz and Du Bois (2002) suggest that the opposite is true,

namely that national cuisines—imagined as they are in the same way as ethnicities or

nationalities—emerge not from homogenization but from “dialectical interaction” that in the

Philippine case must account for how Filipinos make culinary choices from amongst local,

regional, and international influences.11 I argue that this process generally followed local

categories and uses for food products from cooking to ethnomedicine, while also reflecting

Filipinos’ positionalities as at least nominal Spanish subjects experiencing varying degrees of

influence or direct control by colonial authorities. Thus an effort to determine what constitutes

local Filipino culinary ideologies and thus Filipino food as a national category suggests some

general features such as rice being the cereal of choice, vegetable dishes as common viands, and

a taste for sour flavors like those produced by vinegars, guava, or tamarind.12 The main point in

this determination, though, is that there are many such culinary ideologies at play within the

general sphere of Filipino cuisines, both overlapping and mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the

introduction of New World products and the centuries-long shift from subsistence to cash crop

agriculture as a result of Spanish and American colonization led to further changes in the

socioeconomic conditions under which Filipino foodways find expression.

Examples abound of how these different ideologies play out all under the larger umbrella

of Filipino food. For a particularly apparent case, the widespread adoption of Chinese dishes

across the Philippines reflects the archipelago’s long-standing economic relationship with the

11
Appadurai 1988:21-22.
12
See also Lim-Castillo 2006, Cabotaje 1976, and Scott 1994.

9
Fujian coast to which the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade connected beginning in the 16th

century. Dishes that were once new have since become traditional as in the case of Lapaz

batchoy and Pancit Molo, both Chinese in origin but now famous as Ilonggo specialties.13 Many

culinary ideologies reflect interaction with imported faiths: Catholic prohibitions against meat on

holy days; Islamic ​halal​ codes; and Protestant iterations such as Seventh-Day Adventists’

observation of health laws found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy or various denominations which

teach abstinence from alcohol, coffee, and other stimulants. Included here would also be the

culinary ideologies of the archipelago’s Indigenous Peoples and their respective categories of

what plants or animals are fit for human consumption, sacrifice, animal feed, medicine, or a

combination of these and other categories. This is not to limit such ethnomedical and culinary

ideas to only IPs, as more discussion will be had below about the prevalence of plural medical

systems throughout the Philippines. Rather, I would construct a picture of many different

culinary ideologies operating simultaneously, sometimes overlapping, sometimes in opposition,

but each constituting Filipino food in its own way. To continue this analysis, some additional

historical context is required first.

MANILA-ACAPULCO GALLEON TRADE

Much has been written already about the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade, and as such this

section will largely point to other sources that give more comprehensive overviews of its roughly

250-year history from 1571 to 1815. The trade constituted the final leap that the Spanish Empire

would make in order to secure itself a direct market for purchasing luxury goods from China and

the Moluccas, chiefly spices and textiles, though porcelains, furniture, and other foodstuffs also

13
For a historical overview of Hokkien-speaking Chinese presence in Iloilo, see Madrid 2013.

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entered into galleons bound for Mexico and Spain beyond.14 Further context will illuminate the

bearing that this system of exchange between the Philippines and ultimately the capital of the

Viceroyalty of New Spain in Mexico had on changing Filipino foodways since the trade began

until the present.

For the purposes of this paper, the Manila-Acapulco trade route is considered in terms of

its implications for both Filipino labor and consumption.15 Guevarra (2011) notes that it was the

particular combination of native resources—hardwoods and men to shape and crew the galleons

for which they were harvested—on the one hand and forced labor regimes16 on the other that led

to the trade taking on the character it did: Filipinos building and crewing Spanish ships to

exchange Asian and American goods, mostly for the benefit of the empire’s elites on opposite

ends of the empire. Of those Filipinos who did participate directly in the trade, many who did not

perish on the eastward journey deserted after reaching Mexico, where they tended to intermingle

with indigenous Mexicans unless captured and deported back to the Philippines by colonial

authorities.17 The roles Filipino sailors had in the trade were thus almost explicitly as laborers

rather than as consumers and while travel to the New World certainly exposed them to New

World foods as well, the compulsory nature of much of their participation and high rates of

14
Schurz 1939; Merriman 1962; Gänger 2015; and Gasch-Tomás 2019.
15
Ango (2010) provides a more complete account than can be given here regarding the galleon trade’s
beginnings in Cebu from the first ship sent back to New Spain in 1565 to the eventual cessation of direct trade in
1611. He concludes that this was a result of multiple factors, the chief of these being a series of protectionist royal
decrees that effectively solidified the monopolies of Manila and Acapulco by first restricting and then banning
(albeit unsuccessfully) any competing trade routes between the Philippines and the Americas.
16
Mawson (2016) argues compellingly that forced labor systems such as military service, ​repartimiento,​
and ​bandala​ were essentially outgrowths of preexisting networks of debt bondage between local Filipino elites and
the ​alipin​ class. That these were also abused by Spanish officials and clergy despite repeated legislative attempts to
reform them and pay indigenous laborers for goods and services procured through them does not diminish the
importance of prehispanic socioeconomic ties in both their maintenance over the duration of the colonial period and
the constant threat of revolt and desertion by local people conscripted into labor that was frequently dangerous and
unpaid in return for only rare opportunities for upward social mobility.
17
Guevarra 2011:393-394. Some of these deserters also settled in present-day California and Louisiana
(Talampas 2015).

11
desertion highlight the power of Spanish imperial officials in dictating its terms even as they

could not control all of its results.18

However, Bjork (1998) argues compellingly that the real victor in the trade was neither

the Philippines nor Spain but rather Mexico. It was Mexican merchants who leveraged their glut

of Andean silver to inflate shipping fees from Acapulco sufficiently to create a near-monopoly

on the contents of the westward-bound galleons, much to the chagrin of their competitors in

Manila and Spanish merchant hubs like Seville and Cadiz. Far outnumbering the mercantile elite

who sold goods on the galleons were indigenous Mexican and free black laborers who leveraged

their skills, locations, and obligations to the crown under the ​repartimiento​ to provide necessary

services to galleon travelers for a price.19

Furthermore, the predominance of colonial officials and clergy of Mexican origin (as

opposed to peninsular Spaniards) in the Philippines also exerted influence on the demand in

Manila for New World goods. This power imbalance led to efforts by Spanish merchants in

particular to force the crown’s hand on controlling the trade, starting with restrictions on the

Asian textile trade to Peru in 1581, banning of direct Philippines-Peru trade in 1591, and

ultimately banning of all trade between New Spain and Peru in 1631. These and other similar

regulations repeatedly failed both to shift the balance of economic power back to Spain and end

the massive contraband trade in Asian goods between the Philippines, New Spain, and Peru that

18
For example, sailors who did make the return voyage from Acapulco were permitted to take with them 80
pesos’ worth of goods in the galleon’s hold, with the expectation of 100-200% profits upon reaching Manila. This
along with shipboard rations comprised of foods meant to appeal to multi-ethnic crews drawn from Western Europe,
the Americas, as well as Island and Mainland Southeast Asia—including rice and biscuits alongside chocolate from
Mexico and the Philippines as well as Filipino rice wine—undoubtedly had an effect on the tastes of westbound
sailors, most of whom would be a combination of indigenous, ​mestizo,​ and/or lower class (Smalley 1995).
19
Seijas 2016 gives a brief overview of three ways in which local Mexican labor benefited and was
benefited by the galleon trade, though does not elaborate about how economic conditions there may have compared
to those in Manila.

12
existed precisely because of such restrictions.20 In an ironic reversal, a system meant to enrich

the Spanish imperial core at the expense of its European and West/Central Asian competitors

saw its chief economic benefits going to New Spanish middlemen.

Of course, this state of affairs was not permanent. Just as the galleon trade emerged to

meet the particular needs of particular customers within a particular time and place, shifts in

global markets saw the Manila-Acapulco run come to an end eight decades before the colony

itself did with the American capture of Manila. Gasch-Tomás (2019:89-90) suggests four

possible causes which began in the 17th century: the entry of Dutch and English traders into

Spanish markets, leading to diverted consumption of silver and increased military conflict; the

greater danger and lower diversification of the Pacific route compared the Cape; the Acapulco

monopoly’s inability to absorb as many goods as could those in Europe; and conflicting motives

of Sevillian and Mexican merchants that restricted the Pacific route’s commercial potential. By

the 19th century, Spain ended international trade restrictions and reopened the port in Cebu,

moving the archipelago from an economic dependency of Mexico to a hub once more of global

merchant traffic.21

So then where is Filipino agency to be found in the galleon trade? In Mexico, certainly,

where Filipino deserters from the galleons went on to transplant native industries and form their

own communities all throughout colonial Mexico. Back in the islands, forced labor under both

Spanish officials and native elites sought to control modes of both production and reproduction

with the aim of creating righteous, willing Catholic subjects.22 Further research would be

necessary to explore a secondary market in the Philippines such as that which supplied Acapulco

20
Bjork 1998:41-43.
21
Ango 2010 and McElhinny 2005.
22
See also Reyes 2019.

13
and its travelers with provisions for the westward voyage. In the meantime, I argue that colonial

Filipino agency within the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade can be located in part through an

analysis of relationships—symbolic, socioeconomic, nutritive, etc.—that non-elite Filipinos

created with the New World crops they encountered as a result of the trade. In doing so, my

methodological approach is less symbolic anthropology and more one based in practice theory,

in order for local categories and everyday behaviors to be brought to the fore.

CULTURAL PENETRATION AND SYMBOLIC MEANINGS

Symbolic uses as ways to understand how Filipinos related to introduced New World

crops range from the mundane to the arcane. In her essay “The Flavors of Mexico in Philippine

Food and Culture,” Doreen Fernandez (1997:199-200) gives an excellent guide to how the entry

of New World crops and recipes can be analyzed from their introduction until full acceptance.

The processes of cultural adaptation, therefore, include some or all of the following:
transplanting the foreign food/element to the adoptive/adaptive soil; proliferation to the
extent that places are named after it; acceptance into the diet in ways identical or similar
to its native ways; elaboration of its food uses in new ways; entry into the belief system;
entry into and elaboration in, the language; folk use and adaptation; and finally
transformation into a Philippine food by the acquisition of uniquely local nuances, and
firm placement in the Philippine repertory.

From the standpoint of historical anthropology, this also shifts the focus of investigation for

processes of meaning-making away from literate Spanish and Filipino elites by instead centering

vernacular uses, both innocuous such as recipes and others like healing which colonial

authorities sought to control if not extirpate in both the Philippines and New Spain.

This connection to Mexico—which Fernandez (1997:200) calls a “brotherhood beneath

the skin” and Ocampo (2016:86) refers to under the general term of “colonial panethnicity”23

23
See also Guerrera 2005 and 2011.

14
—may not be a conscious association whenever these foods are consumed or appear in cultural

uses. For example, consider the list of “sari-sari” plants grown around the titular house in the

folksong Bahay Kubo: of the eighteen crops named, five are American in origin.24 At the same

time, the song and its depicted rural setting with a traditional bamboo house are unquestionably

Filipino, just as the agricultural products mentioned in the lyrics are unquestionably part of

Filipino cuisines. Especially when uses of a given symbol show conflict between elites and

non-elites or colonizer and colonized, its ability to become indigenized to the point that, as Yan

(in Watson 2006:75) says of McDonald’s in China, its “geographic origin of imported culture

has become increasingly less relevant” speaks more to the success of local people than that of

colonizers; “what really matters is its local consequence.” In this case, the imported culture is

also American (albeit indigenous), filtered through Spanish ethnomedical ideology, linguistic

intervention, and while ultimately reflecting Filipino culinary practices.

Returning to Mintz (1995), two of his observations help guide my inquiry related to

meaning-making and food. First, that power—the organizing powers behind the

Manila-Acapulco galleon trade, various forced labor regimes throughout the Spanish Empire,

and presently global capitalism—largely sets the terms for which foods would be available to

any given consumers at any given time. Second, that consumers themselves exercise a degree of

power or agency in adopting these foods or not, imbuing them with certain meaning or meanings

rather than another. That the latter occurs within the constraints of the former does not negate the

ability of colonial Filipinos living under varying degrees of Spanish control to assign meaning to

24
Specifically singkamas (Eng. jicama, Nahua xīcamatl), mani (Eng. peanut, Taíno maní), patani (Eng.
lima or kidney bean), kalabasa (Eng. winter squash, Span. calabaza, Persian kharbuz), and kamatis (Eng. tomato,
Nahua tomatl). Sigarilyas (Eng. winged bean) has a Spanish name but is endemic to Island SE Asia. See also
Acabado 2020.

15
New World foods any more than living under a mercantilist system negated the ability of

working class Britons to produce their own sets of “inside meaning,” as Mintz (1995:6-7)

describes them, for sugar and tea.

That said, the comparison between Filipino consumption of imported American foods

and English consumption of sugar is not a perfect one. Unlike British wage labor, much Filipino

labor under the Spanish colonial system and pertaining to the galleon trade specifically was

compulsory in areas under Spanish control, which continued to spread even as populations

became both more concentrated into ​reducciones​ and dispersed as lowlanders fled upstream to

escape taxation, conversion, and other forms of colonial control.25 What is similar in terms of the

underlying process of changing food habits is that the meanings of these foods were not assigned

by the Spanish or even the Mexicans who in large measure controlled the output of the galleon

trade, but by Filipinos according to their own culinary ideologies. Taking this further, the case

could be applied to globalization and specifically global capitalism as a system that individual

consumers cannot control but the constraints of which, such as wages, leisure time, workdays,

and exposure to advertising, affect individual and group habits.

Returning again to the point of agency in reception, Cabotaje’s (1976:96-98) case study

in the agricultural community of Dologon, Bukidnon offers many useful data points. First, while

Dologon residents do place different foods into class-based hierarchies, it is not the rule that New

World imports are placed at the top. Respondents instead reported that the foods they considered

‘​pagkaon sa datu’​ were a mix of local—or at least prehispanic—and imported foods like white

rice, pork, potatoes, ubi, and carrots. Foods they considered ‘​pagkaon sa pobre’​ were similarly

25
Anderson 1976; Alvarez 1998.

16
mixed: camote, gabi, malunggay, brown rice, corn, and all vegetables. As the barrio’s most

prevalent staple crop, corn was said to be more weather-resistant and plentiful than rice, and the

comparative scarcity of white rice due to its higher cost of milling seems to have relegated it to

consumption by local elites or else by others at fiestas, baptisms, or weddings. Despite the

predominance of corn, however, rice is still dominant: the most preferred variety is so because

“it tastes like rice” (ibid 36). Even acceptance into the same culinary category of cereals used as

a base for ulam does not give corn the same connotations of superior prestige and taste.26

What the data from Dologon show is that local people did not place all New World

imports equally on the same pedestal for once being foreign novelties. Instead, associations with

social class, comparative scarcity, susceptibility to weather, and local ideas of food as catalysts

for specific biological effects—for instance, the white sap secreted by green papaya and camote

tops was said to mean that these foods can stimulate milk production in nursing mothers—were

more influential in determining indigenous meanings than a given crop’s former imported status

alone. For example, associations of certain root vegetables like camote and ube with poverty

and/or famine as well as attendant embarrassment—primarily among rice-cultivating groups—is

a frequent theme in historical, ethnomedical, and ethnographic literature on Filipino foodways

and into Indonesia as well.27 However, the same cannot be said in parts of Papua New Guinea,

Polynesia, and the Malay Peninsula where rice was either less predominant or non-existent,

leaving root crops as the primary staple.28 This would suggest that it was not exclusively these

crops’ status as imports that lent them universal prestige, but rather that what Sahlins (1994:5)

referred to as “local cultural schemes” conditioned the contexts of reception for each. In other

26
See also Boomgaard 2003, where tubers are rice’s nutritive competitor rather than corn.
27
Cabotaje 1976; Tan 2008:86-87; Scott 1994; and Acabado 2018.
28
Wiessner 2005 and Boomgaard 2003.

17
words, trade with outsiders and colonial encounters may have introduced these crops but did not

necessarily dictate their respective places within local culinary ideologies. Rather than

contradicting Andaya’s (1997) characterization of Southeast Asian curiosity and receptivity,

instead her statement finds support in the ever-growing array of foods that that have already

passed from foreign and novel to local and traditional.

Indicative of this receptivity as well as the Philippines’ colonial legacies is the mingling

of influences within Filipino ethnomedical systems. Among these are modern Western

biomedicine; Chinese herbal and astrological practices; early modern European humoral

medicine; New World pharmacological repertoires; religious dietary restrictions and laws; and

various local practices inclusive of botanical knowledge, spirit mediumship, and divination, and

other magico-religious rituals and epistemologies. While Tan (2008:5) refers to this as a “clash

of paradigms,” he makes clear that these systems are more overlapping than they are mutually

exclusive. Indeed, contrary to assertions that the spread of globalization and increased access to

Western medicine and education will necessarily reduce the prevalence of ethnomedical

practices, this contact arguably opens new spaces for this clash to occur, wherein seemingly

contradictory ideas of illness causation and treatment each offer solutions that patients,

practitioners, and others advocate for and select from as conscious agents.29

A more complete analysis of confluences between Asian, European, and indigenous

American ethnobotanical medicine is beyond the scope of this present project, though I raise this

point in support of two arguments. First, that Filipino foodways adopted New World crops in

ways that represented individual and collective agency under colonialism, with Filipinos

29
See also Lieban 1967; Cabotaje 1976; Planta 2017; Gänger 2015; Erickson 1997; Fernandez 1994; Islam
2005; Jocano 1966; and Haggett 1955.

18
themselves operating as both consumers of global goods that benefited merchant elites while also

pursuing their own interests, be they in pursuit of health, economic stability, or taste. Second,

that the line between ‘food’ and ‘medicine’ as categories is culturally dependent, such that New

World plants like papaya or tomatoes could fulfill at any given time or place—as culinary fruits

or vegetables, decorative plants, medicines, poisons, etc.—show how Filipinos across the

archipelago saw these once-exotic but now familiar products fitting or not into their own

respective worldviews.

COLONIALISM AND GLOBALIZATION

Among other contrasts such as governmental systems and majority religious affiliations,

Spanish and American colonizers generally differed in their ideological orientations toward

health and sanitation practices relative to the human body. Broadly speaking this difference was

one between Galenic or humoralistic medicine30 on the one hand and biomedicine based on germ

theory on the other. Still, both ethnomedical systems shared the tendency to see food—not only

the products consumed but also the circumstances of their procurement and preparation—as

contributing to a given body’s particular constitution. What exactly this implied about the

humanity and/or character of Filipinos relative to Europeans or white Americans was a subject of

much conversation in records from both colonial periods.

30
Earle (2012:25) defines humoralism as follows: “Long standing European medical tradition held that
good health required a balance of the four humours that governed the body: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow
bile. Each humour possessed particular qualities, being either hot or cold and either moist or dry, and was thus
naturally linked to one of the four elements out of which all substances were formed. Blood was associated with hot,
moist air, phlegm with cold, wet water, black bile with cold, dry earth and yellow bile with hot, dry fire. Each
humour was further associated with a different season of the year, certain constellations and a variety of other
categories.”

19
 In the interest of context, I share an excerpt from Messer (2007:64) to preface a brief

discussion of some Spanish and American reactions to foods they encountered in the Philippines.

She writes:

The process of classifying food into non-food suggests that symbolic, social-cultural and
political-economic criteria are paramount. In addition to conceptual judgment of what is
appropriate, it involves concepts and constraints of status ranking and judgments of
civilised versus non-civilised behaviours. Transforming non-food into food, by contrast,
involves concepts and judgments that expand rather than narrow acceptability…
Non-food also invokes the ‘cooking’ principle; the novel item should look taste and feel
like known ‘food’, and meet certain recognised nutritional ‘needs’, if not for specific
nutrients, then for certain type of food (meat-substitute) or for variety, and not be toxic or
allergenic.

At the same time that Filipino foodways came to accommodate a wide range of New World

crops, colonial culinary ideologies operated as well, making distinctions and comparisons

between the foods with which they were familiar or accepting and those they were not. Implicit

and explicit racist assumptions about the character, civilization, and humanity of Filipinos based

on Spanish and American perceptions of what and how Filipinos ate tended to follow, but such

distinctions between “what Spaniards ate” and “what indios ate” were not always so clear-cut.

Rather, it was earlier Spanish accommodations of New World foods into their own diets and

medical systems that contributed to their subsequent transportation to Asia in the first place.

Ideological linkages between food and constitution in the Spanish Indies began with the

colonial system itself. Earle (2012) demonstrates the pervasiveness of this discourse beginning

with Columbus’ second voyage to Hispaniola—during which he concluded that the thirty-eight

Europeans he had left behind on his first voyage to start the colony had perished due to a lack of

Spanish foods like beef, wine, and wheat bread—and into broader ideological and medical

assumptions within Spanish colonial society on food and environment as catalysts for disease,

20
behavior, and caste.31 Even the bodily creation of proper Christians, either European or ​indio,​

required for many Spanish commentators first a steady supply of wheat bread, grape wine, and

olive oil in the colonies for use in Communion and sacramental anointings.32 Determinations of

culinary familiarity or unfamiliarity within the larger context of humoralism helped Spaniards

comprehend foods which they encountered for the first time, but that had already been in use by

indigenous peoples on both sides of the Pacific for centuries or millennia prior. At any rate,

certain New World foods did win out in the end despite Spanish anxieties about possible

deleterious effects on the European constitution, such that crews’ diets onboard the galleons were

as culinarily blended as the crews themselves were ethnically blended by drawing bodies and

foods from all over the Empire and its peripheries.33

Concerns that Filipino foods could lead to the degeneration of white bodies seem to have

diminished somewhat by the American period compared to the Spanish, but were still prominent

in some discourses brought on by the US occupation of the Philippines. Heightened by more than

only the colonization of the Philippines by whites, another cause for anxiety by some Americans

was the potential for Filipino migration to the mainland. Anderson (2006:5) refers to a complex

of ideas such as these as “magical thinking,” bringing together a number of associative measures

and fears that emerged specifically from the white supremacist ideology of many Americans

whose words he cites. He further details the history and application of American sanitation

efforts in the Philippines to show that while germ theory and laboratory methods played a

significant part in infrastructure development, the primary goal of these was not simply the

31
I use ‘caste’ here to specify the range of human body types and stereotypical performative behaviors
under the ​sistema de castas,​ as opposed to 19th and 20th century conceptions of race as being a function of genetic
inheritance or natural selection.
32
Earle 2012:55-59, Tan 2008:121.
33
Bjork 1998.

21
“uplift” called for by President McKinley but ultimately the protection of white bodies from

other contaminating influences in the tropical environment, including air, climate, food, and

Filipinos themselves.34

This pseudo-humoralistic discourse saw military rations as more than just a means of

giving adequate nutrition to American soldiers to carry on the work of conquering the

Philippines. Rather, the consumption of Filipino foods—which some American doctors believed

lacked sufficient meat to maintain the proper Anglo constitution—was believed to not only make

white men more susceptible to tropical disease, but ultimately threatened the emasculation of the

white race.35 As with Columbus and the other conquistadors, such American commentators saw

the presence of ‘proper’ American foods as a safeguard for American virility and the colonial

project as a whole.36 Warwick Anderson (2006:39) highlights the paradox inherent in these racist

views of environment and food as factors which would invariably degrade white bodies without

sufficient dietary and sanitary precautions, which “meant in practice that only Filipinos and

Chinese should perform heavy manual labor, such as lugging ambulance litters. But what was

fighting the war if not a form of hard labor?” Viewing the Philippines variously as an

opportunity for resource extraction, way station to China, and field of evangelical labor, the

34
See also McElhinny 2005 and Ileto 1988.
35
Anderson 2006:41-43.
36
American labor leaders Samuel Gompers and Herman Gutstadt (1902) shared a similar sentiment in a
polemical pamphlet entitled “Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion; Meat vs. Rice; American Manhood Against
Asiatic Coolieism; Which Shall Survive?” that laid out this argument in more than metaphorical terms. For their
purposes, the conflict between Chinese labor migrants in the US West Coast states—whom they portrayed as
swarming, cancerous, filthy, and more than willing to work in near-servitude to price out their competition—and
white Americans also included Filipinos, quoting General Arthur MacArthur in praising them as being just as
industrious as whites. This comparative praise for Filipinos, however, should ultimately be understood in the context
of Gompers’ main reason for supporting the Chinese Exclusion Act’s renewal, which one biographer characterized
as “opportunistic fears of threats to economic status, and as founded on a sense of racial superiority to conquered
peoples.” Meat and rice, then, became as did meat and tubers or wheat bread and maize flour indexes of race,
specifically the differences that white European colonizers imagined between their own bodies and those of indios in
two hemispheres.

22
United States government and its colonial administrators like the Spanish before them ensured

that the overwhelming bulk of the work needed to support the colony—much of which was

agricultural—would not be done by Americans themselves.

Without reiterating the entire history of ​encomienda,​ ​repartimiento,​ ​reducciones​, and

pueblos​ as means of socioeconomic control, these systems effected great changes in the lifeways

of Filipinos in areas under Spanish domination, both for those who remained and those who fled

inland.37 These systems along with the gradual decline of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade and

transition to cash cropping in the late Spanish and American periods of cotton, tobacco,

sugarcane, and coconuts.38 Such was not the case at the outset of Spanish settlement in 1565. At

least in comparison to New Spain, whose merchants grew fabulously wealthy enough to provoke

envy in their peninsular competitors, Spanish efforts to control the Philippines were permitted by

the crown to operate nearly at a loss and Manila itself was wholly reliant on Acapulco for its

annual provisions in silver, soldiers, and other Mexican goods until after the galleon trade came

to an end.39 Direct Spanish missionization of China never had the same effect as was seen in the

Philippines. However, the trade in American silver for Chinese and other Southeast Asian

consumer goods was so successful that within a century of the Manila-Acapulco run’s inception,

the global silver market had already become saturated and prices subsequently crashed.40 By

1826—eleven years after route came to end—all galleon routes between Latin America and the

Philippines ceased as Spanish silver reserves in the region were lost to a series of revolutions,

leaving Manila as primarily an exit port for cash crops.41

37
See also Acabado 2018 and Paredes 2013.
38
Camba 2018; Anderson 1976; and Bauzon 1975.
39
Seijas 2016:56 and Bjork 1998.
40
Gasch-Tomás 2019:51-54.
41
Cheong 1971: 149-151.

23
 For the most part, the New World crops discussed here were not cash crops, though still

very much a part of the overall trade and massively influential on regional cuisines. Potatoes,

tomatoes, pineapples, chilies, sweet potatoes, sugar-apples, maize, peanuts, papaya, cassava,

achiote, and others spread into Asia on the west from Portuguese Brazil and on the east from

Spanish Mexico. While the Cape and Manila-Acapulco routes competed, the former helped lay

the groundwork for the latter’s success by priming East Asian markets for American plants.42

Manila’s position along preexisting routes between the Fujian coast, Borneo, and Maluku had

already made it a center of regional trade long before the Spanish arrived, and it was within these

same networks that New World imports would have spread into the eastern Indonesian

archipelago, parts of southeastern China, and Nagasaki.43 From there, these plants came to be

incorporated into cuisines throughout Asia, often with names still resembling the Nahuatl, Taíno,

or Arawak originals borrowed by Spanish or Portuguese colonizers but indigenized through use

so thoroughly that many are inseparable ingredients in even ‘traditional’ dishes.

Similar processes of indigenization are a theme within globalization literature that seeks

to problematize previous assumptions within the field that Western cultural hegemony would

inevitably homogenize or synchronize the periphery until it resembled the core after

Wallerstein’s world-systems theory.44 Inda and Rosaldo (2002:17-19) argue instead that “cross

traffic” in cultural texts and goods like musical genres, Hollywood movies and cuisines lead to

new instances of interpretation that do not necessarily follow so-called core hegemony, but rather

reflect local ideologies. In other words, “the core has been peripheralized” by the same global

networks that spread its influence into the periphery.

42
Gänger 2015:52; Haggett 1955; Boomgaard 2003.
43
Gasch-Tomás 2019:58-59.
44
Burawoy 2000; Abu-Lughod 1997; Tsuda, Tapias, and Escandell 2014; Appadurai 1996; Watson 2006.

24
 The global Filipino diaspora participates in these networks at multiple levels, from the

micro-scale transactions that go into filling balikbayan boxes45 to the macro-scale worldwide

growth of Jollibee. Since 1975, the chain has expanded from a single Quezon City store in 1975

to now over 1300 locations on three continents.46 Its parent company Jollibee Foods Corporation

has also turned international, acquiring stakes in or outright ownership of both Filipino and

American chains, including Chow King,47 Panda Express Philippines,48 Smash Burger,49 and The

Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.50 At the same time, a number of American food commentators have

predicted for the last decade that Filipino food would “explode” in the US and global markets,51

become “the next big thing,”52 or even “the next Great American Cuisine”.53 In line with

aforementioned observations by Yan (2006) and Inda and Rosado (2002), the flow of imported

cultural goods—specifically, dishes and assembly line production after American fast food

chains—are not simply forced onto other nations under the homogenizing regime of global

capitalism, but rather return to their culinary points of origin with their own economic power and

45
Patzer 2018 and Ocampo 2016:57.
46
Cabuenas, Jon Viktor D. “Jollibee to Open 500 New Stores in 2019.” GMA News Online, May 15, 2019.
https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/money/companies/694537/jollibee-to-open-500-new-stores-in-2019/story/.
47
Dumlao, Doris C. “Jollibee Taking Over US Franchise of Chowking.” Inquirer, May 20, 2011.
https://globalnation.inquirer.net/2039/jollibee-taking-over-us-franchise-of-chowking.
48
“Jollibee, US-based Panda Group Create Joint Venture Firm Covering PHL Market.” GMA News
Online, July 8, 2019.
https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/money/companies/700262/jollibee-us-based-panda-group-create-joint-venture-f
irm-covering-phl-market/story/.
49
Industry News. “Jollibee Foods Corporation Now 100 Percent Owner of Smashburger.” QSR Magazine,
December 14, 2018.
https://www.qsrmagazine.com/news/jollibee-foods-corporation-now-100-percent-owner-smashburger
50
Boykoff, Pamela. “Jollibee Buys Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.” CNN Business, July 24, 2019.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/24/business/jollibee-coffee-bean-tea-leaf/index.html.
51
Cabato, Regine. “Anthony Bourdain: Sisig Will 'Win the Hearts and Minds of the World'.” CNN
Philippines, June 15, 2017. https://cnnphilippines.com/news/2017/06/05/anthony-bourdain-sisig.html.
52
Meewes, Veronica. “Andrew Zimmern: Filipino Food Is the ‘Next Big Thing’.” Today, June 12, 2012.
https://www.today.com/food/andrew-zimmern-filipino-food-next-big-thing-824655.
53
McNeilly, Claudia. “How Filipino Food Is Becoming the Next Great American Cuisine.” Vogue, June 1,
2017. https://www.vogue.com/article/filipino-food-philippines-cuisine-restaurants.

25
(re)interpretations of adopted symbols. Only continued future growth of Jollibee and Filipino

food abroad will give an indication of whether or not non-Filipinos will see either as being

Filipino food or their own, having been re-indigenized and adopted once more.

CONCLUSION

This paper has taken a multidisciplinary approach to answering, or at least suggests

further directions for answering, the question of how Filipino foodways broadly construed have

changed since the Spanish galleon trade with Mexico began in 1565. In doing so, I drew from a

number of different literatures, including practice theory; anthropology of food; historical works

on the Spanish and American Empires; ethnomedicine; and globalization. The resulting analysis

considered ‘Filipino food’ as a product of local, national, and colonial culinary ideologies

combined with a wide array of crops imported to the archipelago, both for subsistence and

cash-cropping purposes. While seemingly monolithic or even American in its corporate

expressions abroad, regional cuisines show a wide range of diversity in terms of the religious

dietary laws, resources, and other migrant populations that inform them even while certain

ingredients and preparation methods are fairly consistent. More than only nutrition, Filipino food

is intangible heritage, as well as a physical and emotional component of Filipino identities,

though not necessarily in the ways that Spanish and American colonizers imagined. Rather, it

was Filipinos across religious, ethnolinguistic, and geographic lines whose ingenuity and

adaptiveness brought in and reinterpreted New World foods to meet their respective needs and

tastes.

With Bjork (1998) in mind, it is important to state that such strict culinary differentiations

of race, physiology, and civilization as idealized by some Europeans and Americans were never

26
so concrete in practice. The frequent lack of familiar ‘white’ foods as noted by various officials

and other colonists compared to the relative bounty of local foods suggests that colonial diets

were in fact mixed, though perhaps more out of necessity at first than preference. Still, the same

human attraction to novelty that was part of what drew Britons to tea and sugar undoubtedly

operated in reverse on enough occasions that Spaniards sought to understand Filipino dishes on

the own terms, while Filipinos also adapted Spanish dishes to their respective tastes, ingredients,

and culinary needs. One result is the proliferation of Spanish names for Filipino dishes whose

origins or preparations were prehispanic, making it difficult in some cases to determine which

came first. A list of such dishes would be quite exhaustive and include such examples as adobo,

chorizo, mechado, estofado, arroz caldo, relleno, bistek, and more.54

Nearly five decades of American occupation and subsequently over five more of cultural

hegemony in global capitalism brought with them dishes adapted from the United States’ own

immigrant and enslaved populations, all of which are now familiar to Filipino consumers, such

as burgers, hot dogs, spaghetti, and fried chicken. At the same time, neither the presence of these

menu items nor American fast food production methods make Jollibee an American restaurant.

More than its national origins, Jollibee and traditional Filipino dishes using ingredients imported

from the Americas owe their Filipino-ness to particular culinary ideologies that adapt foreign

tastes to their own, cross oceans, in turn continue to shape global food trends.

54
Lim-Castillo (2006) argues that adobo is an iteration of much earlier pickling and preservation techniques
for fish in palm vinegar, making its Spanish name an example where Spaniards applied their term for all marinated
meat (​adobada)​ to the local process they observed in the Philippines. See also Fernandez 1997: 193-194.
Interestingly, a borrowing of this preparation also made its way to Mexico and Peru as a result of the galleon trade in
the form of ceviche, or raw fish and vegetables cured in citrus juice and vinegar similar to kilawin (Guevarra 2011).

27
English name Scientific name Etymology notes Geographic origin Extra-nutritive use(s)
achiote Bixa orellana āchiotl (Nahuatl) American tropics Antihemorrhagic and dietary aid (Planta
2017:146)
avocado Persea āhuacatl Mexico
americana (Nahuatl)
calabasa Cucurbita kharbuz (Persian) North America
moschata
camachile Pithecellobium cuauhmochitl American tropics tanning, cure for ulcers, abortifacient,
dulce (Nahuatl) and fish poison (Fernandez 1997:190)
cashew Anacardium acajú (Tupi) American tropics escharotic, used to lance boils (Planta
occidentale 2017:184); cure for headaches
(Fernandez 1997:188)
cassava Manihot kasabi (Taíno) South America
esculenta
chayote Sechium edule chayohtli Mexico safe for postpartum mothers (Cabotaje
(Nahuatl) 1976:125)
chico Manilkara xicotzapotl Central America cure for diarrhea and fever, good for
zapota (Nahuatl) mothers after childbirth, tanning, and
diuretic (Fernandez 1997:190)
chili pepper Capsicum chīlli (Nahuatl) Mexico leaves safe for postpartum mothers
annuum (Cabotaje 1976:125)
cocoa Theobroma cacahuatl Meso- and South cash crop (Ango 2010:159)
cacao (Nahuatl) America
guava Psidium guajava guayabo American tropics antiseptic and antidiarrhetic (Planta
(Arawak) 2017:179); anti-inflammatory for use
after circumcision (Cabotaje 1976:75)
or swelling caused by sorcery (Lieban
1967:123); treatment for asthma and
fever (Fernandez 1994:185); pain
reliever, treatment for uterine bleeding
and menstrual disorders, and used in
maternal recovery (de Boer and
Cotingting 2014)
jicama Polymnia xīcamatl Andes cure eye problems (Planta 2017:140)
sonchifolia (Nahuatl)
lima bean Phaseolus Meso- and South
lunatus America
maize Zea mays mahiz (Taíno) southern Mexico diuretic (Planta 2017:197); cash crop
(Cabotaje 1976:35-36); teething aid
(Cabotaje 1976:59); credit after harvest
(Cabotaje 1976:141-142); stomachache

28
 prevention (Jocano 1968:212)
papaya Carica papaya papáia (Arawak) American tropics digestive and cure for worms (Planta
2017:166); rheumatism (Planta
2017:200); safe for postpartum mothers
when green (Cabotaje 1976:125);
skincare, abortifacient, and inducer of
menstruation (Fernandez 1997:186);
antioxidant and anti-inflammatory (de
Boer and Cotingting 2014)
peanut Arachis maní (Taíno) Meso- and South
hypogaea America
pineapple Ananas comosus southern Brazil and cure for worms, vermicide, and
Paraguay purgative (Planta 2017:161); cash crop
(Cabotaje 1976:7 and Fernandez
1997:186); cure for scurvy and used in
textiles (Reyes 2019:51-53 and Bjork
1998:38)
potato Solanum batata (Taíno) throughout
tuberosum Americas
soursop / Annona wanaban (Taíno) American tropics cure for scurvy, liver disease, ulcers,
guyabano / muricata bleeding, and dysentery (Fernandez
custard apple 1997:189)
Spanish plum Spondias xocotl (Nahuatl) American tropics cure for dysentery, throat pain, and
purpurea tympanitis (Fernandez 1997:190)
sugar-apple Annona ahate (Nahuatl) American tropics cure for dysentery and laxative (Planta
squamosa 2017:135); treatment for lice, diarrhea,
colds, cough, and indigestion,
abortifacient, purgative (Fernandez
1997:188)
sweet potato Ipomoea batatas camohtli American tropics good for convalescent people (Planta
(Nahuatl) 2017:141)
tomato Solanum tomatl (Nahuatl) Central America
esculentum and western South
America
Table I.​ Selection of some New World food crops imported into the Philippines as a result of the Manila-Acapulco
galleon trade. Due to the multiplicity and breadth of Filipino ethnomedical and culinary traditions, this table is
necessarily incomplete.

29
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