Cooking as a Classroom: The Bureau of Education’s Failure with Food Pedagogy, 1904-1922

• In Event: Food Insecurity, National Cuisine, and Philippine Modernity in the 20th Century

Abstract

This paper explores how publications on domestic science and culinary instruction by the American-run Philippine Bureau of Education prescribed a new racialized Filipino identity between 1904 and 1922. It focuses on three printed sources—an American educator newsletter called the Philippine Teacher, monthly Bureau of Education instructional pamphlets, and the first national textbook on domestic science titled Good Cooking and Health in the Tropics—revealing how educational administrators failed to serve the first generation of Filipinos born under American rule. The Philippine Teacher contained debates among American educators about the efficacy of applying western domestic science methods developed in Native American and African American public schools in the Philippines. The monthly pamphlets encouraged the creation of student clubs focused on specific culinary aspects such as dining etiquette, animal husbandry, and farming cycles. Yet these clubs also served as laboratories for Filipino students to practice their future roles in the American colonial relationship: as producers of goods for export to the United States, as consumers of American recipes and imports, and practitioners of American culinary behavior. Good Cooking and Health in the Tropics was a publication with few Filipino ingredients or recipes. It thus was arguably much more significant in creating demand for American exports than in increasing the sanitation and nutrition literacy of the Philippine public. The Bureau of Education intended to disseminate food knowledge in these publications, but ignored the daily lives of Filipinos, using food instruction to dictate a course of Americanization that was impossible for most to follow.

Author

• René Alexander Orquiza, Providence College