A virtual talk I delivered at the Southeast Asian Youth Fest organized by the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) on 22 October 2022.

1. Rediscovering Southeast
Asian Food Cultures
Changing Foodscapes,
Challenges to Food Security
Southeast Asian Youth Fest (SYF)
22 October 2022
SEARCA, Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines
Jessie Varquez, Jr.
UGAT/ Anthropological Association of the Philippines

2. flow of presentation
Southeast Asian Foodscapes
Here comes rice
The case of sago
Changing Foodscapes
Challenges to Food Security

3. Prefatory notes
Food is a cultural construct.
Taste is acquired.
Cultures change.
Food is political.
Eating a sago grub
(fieldwork in Agusan del Sur, 2010)

4. Southeast asian foodscapes
• diverse, as reflected in the region's histories,
geographies, languages, religions, political systems, etc.
• once thought to be culturally passive, only on the
receiving end of the ancient civilizations of India and
China
• now a key region in domestication and agricultural
innovations, especially on the foraging-farming
transition
(Hutterer 1983)
(Barker and Richards 2013)

5. "Equatorial populations tend to be
small... often dependent for
subsistence on tubers and tree crops
such as yams, taro, sago, and
bananas... The equatorial zone with
its ever-wet rainforest is not
especially suitable for rice
agriculture...
Today, and presumably also in the
agricultural past, the greatest
population densities occur in the
monsoon regions where rainfall
distribution is reliable and where rice
can flourish, especially in alluvial
landscapes..."
(Bellwood 2005)

6. "In vegecultural
worlds, people and
plants are entangled
by more than the
economics of food
gathering or of
cultivation... human
social life and plant
life are co-
constituted..."
(Barton and Denham 2018)

7. 'bartered' bananas and root crops
(fieldwork in Tawi-Tawi, 2017)

8. Here comes rice!
• The Out of Taiwan Hypothesis for Austronesian
Dispersal into Island Southeast Asia
• Around 5,500 years ago, rice-farming populations
from Neolithic southern China migrated through
Taiwan and spread to Island Southeast Asia and the
Pacific, and carried with them their new lifestyle
(Bellwood 2017)

9. Rice transformation
Pre-colonial:magical, ritualized, symbolic
Spanish period: disenchanted, new technology,
intensified production
Post-colonial: subjected to scientific and
technological engineering
(Aguilar 2013)

10. "Dominant historical narratives in the region suggest a 2000–3000
B.P. inception of the terrace systems, but previous Bayesian
modeling and current archaeobotanical, ethnohistorical, and
ethnographic data indicate that the shift to wet-rice cultivation is
a recent phenomenon and a response to the intrusion of the
Spanish Empire in the northern highland Philippines."
(Acabado et al. 2019)

11. Changing foodscapes
"Visayans called rice humay, tipasi or
paray, but didn't grow much of it
irrigated in the 16th century -- that is,
in pond fields with standing water."
"Among their many root crops, or
tubers, the one the Visayans
considered most nutritious was
taro... Its prominent place in
Visayan life was reflected by an
extensive vocabulary for its parts,
uses, and stages of growth."
"Another starchy staple food
was a kind of flour made from
the inner trunk of the sagu
palm, lumbia..."

12. the case of sago
lumbia (Metroxylon sagu)
lumbia forest and stands
(fieldwork in Agusan del Sur, 2013)

13. the case of sago
lumbia (Metroxylon sagu)

14. S

15. Key takeaways
Southeast Asian foodways is a diverse diet
Rice was introduced through Austronesian expansion
Rice became a staple, relegating other carb sources
Root crops and other carb sources are stigmatized

16. Challenges to food security
Food is a
cultural construct.
Taste is acquired.
Cultures change.
Food is political.
How can we 'rediscover'
the diversity of our
foodscape?
Will this rediscovery
address the challenges
to our food security?

18. rEFERENCES
Acabado, Stephen B., Jared M. Koller, Chin-hsin Liu, Adam J. Lauer, Alan Farahani, Grace Barretto-Tesoro, Marian C. Reyes,
Jonathan Albert Martin, and John A. Peterson. 2019. “The Short History of the Ifugao Rice Terraces: A Local Response to
the Spanish Conquest.” Journal of Field Archaeology 44 (3): 195–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/00934690.2019.1574159.
Aguilar, Filomeno V. 2013. “Rice and Magic: A Cultural History from the Precolonial World to the Present.” Philippine
Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 61 (3): 297–330. https://doi.org/10.1353/phs.2013.0015.
Barker, Graeme, and Martin B. Richards. 2013. “Foraging–Farming Transitions in Island Southeast Asia.” Journal of
Archaeological Method and Theory 20 (2): 256–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9150-7.
Barton, Huw, and Tim Denham. 2018. “Vegecultures and the Social–Biological Transformations of Plants and People.”
Quaternary International 489 (September): 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2016.06.031.
Scott, William Henry. 1990. “Sixteenth-Century Visayan Food Farming.” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 18 (4):
291–311.
Bellwood, Peter. 2005. First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
———. 2017. First Islanders: Prehistory and Human Migration in Island Southeast Asia. Wiley Blackwell.
Hutterer, Karl Leopold. 1983. “The Natural and Cultural History of Southeast Asian Agriculture: Ecological and Evolutionary
Considerations.” Anthropos 78 (1/2): 169–212.

19. Rediscovering Southeast
Asian Food Cultures
Changing Foodscapes,
Challenges to Food Security
Southeast Asian Youth Fest (SYF)
22 October 2022
SEARCA, Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines
Jessie Varquez, Jr.
UGAT/ Anthropological Association of the Philippines