Quite a lot of Filipinos who live within a reasonable distance of a waterway eat their fill of fish. Click here to see our selection of fish traps.
While certain people, such as the Aeta, get their meat primarily from hunting, and most others hunt a little, domestication accounts for most meat. The four major domestic animals are poultry, the dog, the pig, and the carabao, or water buffalo. Only the last was definitely introduced from elsewhere, and all of them run wild on the islands. Filipinos rarely slaughter an animal except in conjunction with religious ceremonies; thus religion and feasting are closely intertwined in the native mind. In some areas the animal sacrificed is as likely to be a dog as anything else.
Mindanao was probably introduced to horses and goats by the Moslems, while cattle and sheep were brought to all the islands by the Spanish.
Rice is the meal par excellence in the Philippines. Filipinos distinguish more that 100 varieties of rice, and growing it takes up more of than their time than anything else. Virtually all agricultural ceremonies revolve around the rice crop. The most important item of wealth is the rice field, and handfuls of the cereal are in some places used as money. When food is offered to the gods it is usually rice. Filipinos can fairly accurately be described as "rice minded."
Two major varieties of rice are cultivated, and which type a group uses makes a major difference in lifestyle and other social characteristics. Lowland rice has to be grown in swamps or heavily irrigated; it therefore requires more attention but also provides much greater yields; in general it has resulted in the much larger populations of people like the Tagalogs and Ilokanos. The people who have gone to the trouble of constructing huge terraces in the sides of mountains have done so for the sake of cultivating lowland rice.
Upland rice grows much more easily, and is consequently the preferred variety for the kaingin, or swidden, system of agriculture. The differences in yield, however, can be seen from the fact that whereas the Apayao actually have more land than the neighboring Ifugao, their population is only a fifth that of the latter.
The next most important subsistence crop after rice was named by the Aztecs. The camote, or sweet potato, was brought from Mexico by the Spanish, and because it requires little care and can be grown in relatively poor soil, it quickly spread to all parts of the Philippines.
The sweet potato quickly grows tiresome as a steady diet, however; hence its relation to rice is that of "poor man's food." This is in fact the basis of the Ifugao class system; the kadangyang, or rich, are those who grow enough rice to have a meal of it every day; the mabitil, or middle class, are destined to be reduced to eating potatoes before the end of the agricultural year; and the poor, or nawatwat, are fated to look upon potatoes as their staple food. Not a happy lot, obviously.
Many trees with edible fruits and other parts are native to the Philippines, and probably provided the bulk of the diet for the earlier human occupants. The fleshy trunk of the sago palm was still the principal food on the island of Mindanao at the time the Spanish arrived. Coconuts and breadfruit were much less used than elsewhere, and banana trees were mostly used for the fiber known as "Manila hemp." The durian, orange, lemon, and lime are also used to various degrees.
The Philippines are not far from the Southeast Asian home of the sugar cane, and for many centuries grew it to produce a wine or rum, which was consumed in association with religious rituals. The sap of the Nipa palm was also fermented for this purpose.
