Street Food as a “Crisis-Ethos”: Food Insecurity and Filipino Culinary Heritage in Manila during the Marcos Regime, 1965-1986

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

Abstract

This paper traces how the policing of street foods in Manila during the Marcos years simultaneously led to its proliferation and its role in intellectual projects of ethnicity and nationalism. In the 1960s, urban centres in the Philippines had begun to feel the pressure of periodic rice and other food shortages. Ferdinand Marcos won the 1965 elections directly addressing this need; by 1968, technocrats fraudulently reported rice surpluses despite secretly importing from Hong Kong and importing other food aid from the United States. These performances of modernity continued well into the 1970s. By the time that doubt had been cast, martial law was declared, and Manila’s streets heavily policed. Disciplinary campaigns especially targeted street food vendors, more brutally re-articulating earlier American colonial campaigns of militant sanitation and street cleaning. These police raids in Manila continued until the end of the Marcos regime, but amidst the regime’s tension and amplifying economic woes, street foods continued to feed the mouths and minds of the city’s population. This paper argues that in the face of lived food insecurity and heavy surveillance, street foods in Manila gave shape to a Philippine Culinary Renaissance during the Marcos years. In the face of increasing food insecurity, public dining multiplied and diversified. Writers and intellectuals increasingly devoted attention to understanding cuisine and nation. They drew from imagined transnational heritage—from Spain, China, Malaya—but paid special homage to the street food vendors of their ancestral and personal memories, who they celebrate for flourishing despite the country’s economic downturn.

Author

• Adrian De Leon, University of Toronto