Click to view full screen
- Title:
- Southern Island Food Crops
- Date Created:
- 2021-05-30
- Description:
- Fr. San Antonio summarised the major food crops growing from 1724 till around 1738. Samar: its plains are fertile producing an abundance of rice. Negros: fertile to rice “with which the natives supply Zebu and other islands around it”. In Cebu the “common food because there is very little rice” was a “seed they call borona which looks like millet, with a smaller grain and more straw”; also grown were garlic, onion, and a “lot of cacao, that of this area having the highest quality and being in great demand.” Mindoro was cited for abundant buri and yonote palms for sagu that is made into the “common bread”; it was not rice rich. The Province of Calamianes grew rice, vegetables, fruits; natives bred a “large number of pigs and chickens.” Mindanao produced an “abundance of rice and roots common [with] the Bisayas”. There was wild cinnamon and 25 towns on the coast of Cagayan, Dapitan and Samboangan cultivated the trees. It was mixed with Ceylonese cinnamon to acquire the export grade of “fine”. There were “beautiful and abundant wild vineyards of grapes”. In Jolo planted crops are not identified, only that there were many edible nests of the salangan bird; also perhaps for their eggs, many tabon birds. The Province of Caraga made salt and grew “rice for its own consumption” as well as good cacao, a botanical introduced to the colony only around 50 years earlier. There is not much mention of food crop diversity. Missions still were mostly along island coastlines (trying to be beyond flood lines) or inland along rivers; interior areas were still being Christianised and parishes created. New botanicals from the the Americas, China and other Asian sources would arrive mostly via missionaries who were still the only Spanish allowed to live and work among the folk for the first 150 years of the colonial experience.
- Subjects:
- Natural resources -- Philippines Salt -- Philippines Crops -- Philippines Agriculture -- Philippines
- Exhibition:
- J San Antonio
- Source:
- FSM photo of cacao fruit
- Type:
- Image;Still Image
- Format:
- image/jpeg
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- "Southern Island Food Crops", Philippine Food History, Felice P. Sta. Maria
- Reference Link:
- felicepstamaria.net/items/coll223.html