Travails

Travails

Well, I don't want to go on about arriving in the Philippines to face a bit of intimate butchery at the Cebu Doctors' Hospital, nor how, on the first day back on my island, I managed to connect myself to a dodgy desk lamp so comprehensively that the shock threw me back against the wall at the other side of the room, landed me on that bit just above my john major, and has left me walking around like an advanced arthritic. So now I'm on my second bout of convalescense this month. Nor will I go on moaning about how a flash flood caused by an over-ambitious bit of concreting (a ring road around my Spanish home town) caused a flash flood which set my essential transport, set of display boxes for my market stand, and half of my trading stock afloat in an underground garage.

Every single one of those was a problem caused by modern 'Progress', which I am trying to avoid.

Naturally, the research project hasn't progressed very much recently, but I can point you to a few new pages on my website at http://coconutstudio.com/index.htm

Siargao Island Guide

Philippines - Now & Before

Haute Cuisine by the Seashore

Going Bananas

Kinilaw - The Art of Natural Food

Philippine Caviare

Surigao City Fish Market

I've gone bananas; the Philippines may have been the origin of the bananas you eat at home. We don't have those sexless, female-gender plastic clones you get from Geest or Dole; we have wild bananas (with great big seeds), big plantains for cooking, sweet little thumb-sized yellow jobs; in fact a whole repertoire of fruits available for the picking long before rice was available here. See Going Bananas

Soon, I'll be going nuts - Coconuts.

(I hope to publish at least one article a week. However, it is more than likely that I will get the first story wrong, so I will be updating articles regularly. If Margaret Mead got so generally conned on Samoa, why shouldn't I do the same here?)

Using Pollution Wisely

A small fish, the balintong (see here - about 20cm long), like a small tuna, schools in masses in the season (October-November). Balintong means 'tumbling' and here's why.

October/November is also a time for heavy, sudden rainstorms in the mountains, and for the flowering of the lagtang tree, also in the mountains. The storms wash the poisonous flowers into the rivers, and who's waiting for them down at the river mouth? Why, the balintong, of course, in their thousands.

Local fishermen make a payao fish attractor, by anchoring a bundle of bamboo to the seabed, and making a sort of umbrella using coconut tree leaves. The fish cluster under the umbrella, in their masses, befuddled (tumbling) with the poison from the lagtang tree flowers.

The fish are netted by the mass; so many that you have to empty half the net just to get it back into the boat. Usually a sinsoro boat system is used; one large boat and a small one, to spread the net.

There are so many fish they are auctioned in the market; very cheaply of course, because there is massive over-supply. They can fetch just about 20c a kilo; about a quarter of the price for any other fresh fish.

But there's a catch, of course; the fish are poisonous. They cannot be dried for storage, because eating a dried one gives you a typical nerve poison reaction. You could have itchy spots on the skin, but worse, a sort of asthmatic reaction which leaves you unable to breathe, and therefore dead.

The fish can be frozen, but when thawed (or eaten fresh) somehow you have to twist the tail and draw out the spinal column (I think that's what Ernie meant by 'pulling out the fibre') before you cook and eat it (or don't cook it, and eat it kinilaw - raw).

So, using natural pollution, like our human-generated massive pollution of the seas, has its disadvantages.

Marine Spaghetti

In an earlier post 'Philippine Caviare' I mentioned lukot, a delicious 'sea spaghetti' - sea-green strands of what looks like spaghetti, but tastes quite different.

Now I have it confirmed that it is, indeed, a 'waste product' of sea-cucumbers - holothurian shit, to put it bluntly. It is collected at low tide, when the strands are washed into rock or sand pools.
It can be eaten raw as kinilaw, with a little dressing, or boiled in a stock, and eaten just like spaghetti.

The sea-cucumber it comes from is the sonrotan, about 75-100cm, found in shallow water. As it eats plankton and other microfauna, from the sandy sea bed, like a hoover, there seeems not to be much problem with what comes out of the other end. It's basically just a long tube stomach, not very mobile, and all of its intelligence could probably be piled onto the head of a very small pin. Now I know where it comes from, I have been a little hesitant, but since I ate it at every opportunity, I'll carry on doing so, because it really is delicious.

(I'll try and find what sonrotan is in English or Latin, and try to provide pictures, both of the animal and its delicious product).

The beast itself can be eaten, by slitting the 'belly' and turning it inside out. You then peel off the interior, and eat it, just like that - kinilaw - raw. You might add a little chopped onion (bombay) some vinegar, salt and spices (chilli and ginger) as a dressing.

The larger sea-cucumber, pisot, is about 20cm long, and looks like nothing more than a large dark brown turd on the seabed. If you pick one up, it squirts a stream of very sticky white 'gum' that sticks to your body underwater, and gets quite painfully tangled with your body hair when you try to pull it off.

It's harvested and the inside is eaten raw as a great local delicacy, or sun-dried for export to China, where it a much sought-after gourmet treat, trepang.

Pisot also means an uncircumcised male sex organ, or an uncircumcised man (what we, at school, used to call a 'Cavalier' as against a 'Roundhead' - the two parties who fought the English Civil War in the 17th century).

Pisot also means a coward, or lack of manly bravery, especially those whose attitude is, well a bit wet. Quite a lot of unfortunate word associations with an animal which looks like a turd, but is a valuable delicacy.

Philippine Caviare

I think I've only eaten genuine caviare, in a portion larger than half a teaspoonful, just once, in a restaurant in Teheran where a friend and I polished off a bucketful of Sevruga and a bottle or three of ice cold vodka.

It was certainly good, but here in the Philippines we have our own caviare from the sea, lato, (Caulerpa lentifera) which is delicious and a lot cheaper. You can eat it straight out of the sea, or with a little sliced onion and some lemon juice or vinegar. Its 'leaves' are like little fish eggs, and pop when you bite them, just like caviare.

Another species guso or agar-agar (Eucheuma spp) is bit tougher, and requires boiling before it can be eaten. It is made into a salad just like lato, but often has small dilis, tiny dried fish, added, as an extra condiment. A vegetarian friend of mine took some (on my recommendation before I knew about the dilis) and was quite horrified by all the little eyes staring at him.

Agar-agar has become a major cash crop, within only the last couple of decades. The big breakthrough came in 1991-3, when there was a possibility that the American FDA might ban Philippine Natural Grade carrageenan, due to heavy opposition from other seaweed producers (the US-based International Food Additives Council (IFAC) and the France-based Marinalg), but finally, the FDA came round.

Finally, the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) approved an International Numbering System (INS) - E407a- for Philippine Natural Grade (PNG) on July 1995 in Rome.
Carrageenan is the refined powder product derived from agar-agar. Food processors use it to enhance food products such as poultry, hams, sausages, and other meat products. It functions as a binder, moisture holder, and gelling agent. Sauces, salad dressings and dips require carrageenan to impart body, provide thickness and stabilize emulsions. It creates a stable gel for canned meat products and shrimp or fish gels. It's used in dairy and dessert products. Whipped creams and toppings retain their stable form due to it. The wonder powder gives body to acid milk products such as cheese and improved fruit suspension in yoghourt. In ice cream, for instance, carrageenan prevents whey separation and ice crystal formation. It is also present in puddings and pie fillings as it creates a stable gel. Even chocolate drinks maintain their quality with the aid of carrageenan. It seems to be used in almost anything which requires a soft, creamy and stable texture, including toothpaste, where it also enhances the foaming properties.
So next time you eat any of these look for E407A on the label - it may have come from my village.

Agar jelly has been around for a long time, of course; penicillin was first grown on a petri dish of the stuff.

It's very easy to grow; all you need to do is find a bit of seabed in a calm area, about 3-4m deep. Then you merely tie small 5cm pieces of agar-agar stalk to pieces of vertically hanging string, ensure you keep the top ends up by using horizontal ropes with floats of old polystyrene foam or empty plastic water bottles, and do the same at the bottom, but weight those lines down. Then you just sit back and wait, while the sea does its work. When the agar-agar has grown about enough, you haul it up, untie it, and sun-dry it on a large tarpaulin on a flat surface (usually a road). The selling price for sun-dried agar-agar is about 40c a kilo.

There are interesting social questions involved in this - each grower has his own 'field' out in the lagoon where he has staked a claim, but there don't seem to be property disputes or agar-agar rustling.

You can see photos of these two seaweeds here.

Lukot is another seafood, but, at the time of writing, it is still a mystery to me. It looks like a sea-green spaghetti, with a much softer texture than either lato or guso, but a similar sea flavour, and is also used in salads. I have been given differing opinions on its origin - it is either a seaweed or, as Ernie says 'the waste products of a sea-cucumber. It's good, so I will have to find out whether I've been eating seaweed or holothurian shit.

Local Names for Fish, the Sea, etc

One of the very first things I will have to do to get this seafood foraging/fishing study going is to learn the local names for fish, and be able to identify them myself.

1) I have 'stolen' a list of Filipino names for fish, fishing terms, etc (If I knew how to find the site again, I would certainly give them credit). The first draft of the Glossary of Fishing Terms is here.

An interesting facet of this list is the number of moans the fishermen use - see the items beginning with 'No...' early in the list.

2) I bought 2 coloured charts of Thai fish and sea creatures in Bangkok, and have had them scanned. As soon as possible, I will get my neighbours to identify these for me, and then publish a full chart so you can see what I'm talking about.

I'm still at the experimental stage with running a weblog simultaneously with a linking website for photographs and other materials, so please bear with me if I get it wrong.

If I do, please use the little envelope sign below to comment.

What Is Early Man Supposed to Have Eaten?

Any student of human origins will tell you that Early Man - Homo erectus - (and probably Early Ape/Man, as well) lived in marginal woodlands (mostly in the African Rift Valley) with some in South Africa.

They must have lived on something, apart from the very occasional times they got some big game, so I googled again to find out what, and found:

"The question is, then, does the woodland environment yield a reliable year round supply of nutrient dense foods?
In the equatorial grassy woodlands of northern Tanzania there are underground plant storage organs available - chiefly Vigna frutescens, V. macrorhyncha, Vatovaea pseudolablab, Eminia entennulifa and Ipomoea transvaalensis.
Seeds of Parkia filicoidea, Adansonia digitata and Sclerocarya birrea are available in discrete areas, but are limited by season and site. An Adansonia pod has about 100 seeds, which ripen in about a 2 month period in the summer 'wet' season. A pod yields about 40 grams of seed.
Edible catipillars live on the Sclerocarya birrea trees.
Bird, monitor lizard and crocodile eggs are seasonally available, whereas reptiles such as python, young crocodile, and monitor lizards are available year round, as are small animals such as rodents, and to a lesser extent, frogs.

Duikers and other small antelope are resident in woodland and grassland patches. Grasshoppers are important converters of grassland to ape protein, as they are captured more easily than mammalian herbivores. Some lifestages of termites are very rich and nutritious. Termites are available all year round, with seasonal peaks.
Fruit can be regionally relatively abundant, with fruit hanging on into the dry winter season, particularly Strychnos sp., Sclerocarya birrea, Grewia sp. and Ziziphus sp.
Edible fungi can be harvested when the rains come, usually in spring and early summer. "
at http://www.naturalhub.com/opinion_right_food_for_the_human_animal_evolution_of_the_human_diet.htm

This doesn't suggest a very exciting menu:

Underground plant storage organs Seeds Eggs of birds, lizards or crocodiles
Reptiles, rodents, frogs Grasshoppers Termites
Fruit Fungi

Perhaps you can understand why I prefer to think they lived by the seashore and ate much more nutritious and plentiful food.

What about the rice?

My objective in doing a seashore foraging study in a Filipino island village is to try and reconstruct a diet and way of life that early man (Homo erectus and later, Homo sapiens) could have used when they travelled to Eastern Asia from Africa, presumably along the shoreline.

But what about the rice? My neighbours eat rice, rice, and rice, foremost - anything else is just a condiment. So how could early man have had a similar diet if he didn't cultivate rice?

I think that problem will need some more considered thought than I can spare right now.

There has been discussion (and some controversy) about the supposed inability of modern hunter-gatherers to survive in certain places (specially rainforests) without getting necessary carbohydrates from local cultivators. I wondered how their ancestors had survived before cultivators came along to help them out.

So I've been googling again on the origins of the main carbohydrate food plants, which brought some surprises.

Yoy may find some of the links interesting, I hope.

Maize
Zea mays ssp. mays - originated from teosinte in Mexico, but teosinte is totally unlike modern sweetcorn, except that it does 'pop' on a fire. To get to modern sweetcorn must have taken a lot of human selection as well. Somehow, maize got to Asia very early - Magellan was feasted with it on Limasawa, an island very near to mine.
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/3288/ARCHAEOLOGY.HTM
http://www.globalserve.net/~yuku/dif/wmz1230a.htm

Wheat
Triticum spp - originated in SE Turkey, but wild wheat shatters as it ripens, helping it to spread seed. Humans had to select nonshattering varieties, which went against a strong plant evolutionary trend which had strengthened over millions of years - it couldn't have been easy.
http://www.athenapub.com/einkorn1.htm
http://www.spelt.com/origins.html
http://www.odu.edu/webroot/instr/sci/plant.nsf/pages/wheatandproducts

Rice
Oryza sativa originated in China but I don't know the difficulties of early cultivation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice
Chinese Rice
http://www.carleton.ca/~bgordon/Rice/papers/zhimin99.htm
http://www.carleton.ca/~bgordon/Rice/papers/XiangAQ2000.htm
African rice
Oryza glaberrima - is presumably a rice species of African origin, grown in West Africa. Madagascar (at least in the highlands) is also a rice-growing society, but they are descended from Indonesians.
http://antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/murray/

Added 25 Oct 2004
How could I have forgotten this one?
Banana
Musa acuminata - Bananas originated in South East Asia or Western Pacific. It used to have hard seeds, and was pretty much inedible. 'Modern' bananas are female, but sterile, and cultivated by transplanting suckers from the base of the tree. At some time, the original species, acuminata, was crossed with another, balbisiana, (perhaps in India or the Philippines) which gave them far more resistance to drought, made them more starchy, and more suitable, as plantains, for cooking. The world's 4th staple crop is the banana, but most of these are plantains for cooking, 73% of which are now grown and eaten in West & Central Africa.
The sweeter varieties used in Western countries as dessert bananas are mostly grown in the Caribbean and Central merica, and are descended from bananas taken to the Canary Islands in the 16thC.
Bananas are so common on Siargao Island that they are practically weeds. There are many different varieties, from sweet to very coarse, and I can well imagine them as an essential item of prehistoric food use.
http://www.arc.agric.za/institutes/itsc/main/banana/origin.htm
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/07/0726_wirebanana.html

Coconut
Cocos nucifera - either SE Asia or NW South America, but spreads easily along shorelines, and hardly needs 'cultivation'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut

Cassava/Manioc
Manihot esculenta - originated in the Amazon Basin
but "All cassava contains varying amounts of cyanide, a toxin that protects the plant from insects. Indigenous people have learned to avoid poisoning themselves by spitting into batches of the ground tubers; the saliva introduces bacteria and fungi, which activate an enzyme that breaks down the cyanide. Villagers accomplish the same thing by depositing freshly dug cassava tubers into a community pond; microorganisms in the water degrade the cyanide."
It's a bit strange that a 'Stone Age Tribe' the Taut Batu on Palawan in the Philippines, discovered only in the '70s, were growing a plant from South America.
http://news-info.wustl.edu/feature/1999/May99-staple.html
http://www.txtwriter.com/Onscience/Articles/cassava.html

Taro
Colocasia esculenta - originated in Malaysia
It can like yams, be para-cultivated by simply planting the tops - Polynesians carried these all over the Pacific http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/economicbotany/Colocasia/
http://www.fao.org/WAIRdocs/x5425e/x5425e01.htm

Sweet Potato (Camote)
Ipomoea batatas Origin- South America (- also origin of word 'potato')
Again, this can be cultivated very easily.
But it somehow became a staple of New Guinean horticulturalists long before it 'should' have done.
http://apdl.kcc.hawaii.edu/~ahupuaa/botany/food/uala.htmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato

Sago (Tapioca)
Cycas revoluta - originated in SE Asia (grows wild on my island)
but it contains a neurotoxin which brings on paralysis and dementia - see Oliver Sacks' book 'The Island of the Colorblind' where he traces a mysterious disease among the Camorro of Guam to their main foodplant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sago

24 Oct 2004 - Revision
I got this wrong, of course - by far the most important sago plant is the true sago palm (Metroxylon sagu) a staple food for New Guineans, where in some parts it forms 85% of the carbohydrate diet, and it is 'para-cultivated' by Penan hunter-gatherers of Borneo.
http://www.pacsoa.org.au/palms/Metroxylon/sagu.html
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/courses/361/barkin.html


Potato
Solanum tuberosum - Originated in the Andes
The potato is a member of the nightshade family and its leaves are, indeed, poisonous. A potato left too long in the light will begin to turn green. The green skin contains a substance called solanine which can cause the potato to taste bitter and even cause illness in humans. Its cultivation as a single variety prone to potato blight led to the Irish famine of the 1840s and ultimately to the glories of Boston and the NYPD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato
http://www.indepthinfo.com/potato/history.shtml

In short, after this I wondered how anyone survived early efforts at agriculture at all.

A very good book about the origins of agriculture and the subsequent ascendancy of Europeans is 'Guns, Germs and Steel' by Jared Diamond.

Evolution/Creation - Take it from a 15 year old 'idiot savant'

Coconut Studio


People believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance. But they should think logically and if they thought logically they would see that they can only ask this question because it has already happened and they exist.

And there are billions of planets where there is no life, but there is no one on those planets with brains to notice.

And it is like if everyone in the world was tossing coins eventually someone would get 5698 heads in a row and they would think they were very special. But they wouldn't be because there would be millions of people who didn't get 5698 heads.

And there is life on earth because of an accident. But it is a very special kind of accident.

And for this accident to happen in this special way, there have to be 3 conditions.

And these are:

1) Things have to make copies of themselves (this is called Replication)

2) They have to make small mistakes when they do this (this is called Mutation)

3) These mistakes have to be the same in their copies (this is called Heritability)

And these conditions are very rare, but they are possible, and they cause life. And it just happens. But it doesn't have to end up with rhinoceroses and human beings and whales. It could end up with anything.

And, for example, some people say how can an eye happen by accident? Because an eye has to evolve from something else very like an eye and it doesn't just happen because of a genetic mistake, and what is the use of half an eye? But half an eye is very useful because half an eye means that an animal can see half an animal that wants to eat it and get out of the way, and it will eat the animal that only has a third of an eye or 49% of an eye instead because it hasn't got out of the way quick enough, and the animal that is eaten won't have babies because it is dead. And 1% of an eye is better than no eye.

And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on the earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or humans will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.


Chapter 199 of Mark Haddon's 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time' written by the 15 year old autistic boy who narrates the story - all the chapters are prime numbers because he likes prime numbers.