Rotten Beef, Stinking Fish

ROTTEN BEEF AND STINKING FISH: RIZAL AND THE WRITING OF PHILIPPINE HISTORY Ambeth R. Ocampo Antonio de Morga, lieutenant governor of the Philippines (in the late sixteenth century), described the food of the indios as follows: Their daily fare is composed of rice crushed in wooden pillars and when cooked is called morisqueta (this is the staple throughout the land); cooked fish which they have in abundance; pork, venison, mountain buffaloes which they call carabaos, beef and fish which they know is best when it has started to rot and stink (Emphasis supplied.)1 Reading this text in the British Museum 280 years later Rizal was so incensed that he later responded in print with: This is another preoccupation of the Spaniards who, like any other nation, treat food to which they are not accustomed or is unknown to them with disgust. The English, for example, feels horror to see a Spaniard eating snails; to the Spaniard roast beef is repugnant and he cannot understand how Steak Tartar or raw beef can be eaten; the Chinese who have tahuri and eat shark cannot stand Roquefort cheese etc, etc. This fish Morga mentions, that cannot be known to be good until it begins to rot, all on the contrary, it is bagoong [salted and fermented fish or shrimp paste used as a sauce in Filipino cuisine] and those who have eaten it and tasted it know that it neither is nor should be rotten.2 Rizal's sarcastic rebuttal appears, surprisingly, not in his satirical novels or his polemical tracts, but in a scholarly work -his annotated re-edition of Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas de Filipinas. Aside from the racial slurs to which Rizal was reacting, however, Rizal maintained mixed feelings for the Morga,

depending on its usefulness for his thesis that Spanish colonization retarded, rather than brought civilization to the Philippines and its inhabitants. Unfortunately Rizal’s Morga has been relegated in the canon, under his "minor writings,"3 and remains largely unread due to the pre-eminence of...