Roots Take Many Forms
In the Philippines, rice is often seen as the heart of every meal, but across the country’s upland communities, where the terrain makes rice difficult to grow, families have long built their meals around what the land can offer.
In Sitio Ballo, Kabankalan City, Negros Occidental, corn, banana, coconut, and root crops find their way into the kitchen in different forms, depending on what is available, what the family needs, and what people have learned from those who came before them.
I first went to Sitio Ballo on the back of a habal-habal on a rainy morning. The road was steep and slippery. At some points, I kept my eyes closed as the motorcycle made its way up the mountain, too nervous to watch the road. After thirty to forty minutes, we finally arrived, and I met the members of the Ballo Mainit Farmers Association.
We had come to document some of the recipes they regularly prepare for Kusina ni Tantsa, a recipe book under SEARICE’s project on strengthening smallholder farmers’ access to plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. I thought we would only be documenting food, yet the farmers also showed me how they have learned to live with the landscape.
1st Photo: A farmer scrapes the ground Kayos flour from a wooden lusong (mortar) onto a bilao (shallow woven tray), where it will be sifted by hand.; 2nd Photo: A farmer opens a sack of flour made from Kayos, an indigenous root crop that he stored months earlier, preserving the harvest through a practice passed down through generations.
One of the crops they shared was kayos, an indigenous root crop that can be made into flour. It is not something that can simply be harvested and eaten. The farmers described a process that takes several days, involving a series of pounding, washing, drying, and sifting. The steps have to be done carefully because the raw root contains substances that can cause poisoning if it is not properly processed. Knowing how to prepare it safely is therefore part of knowing how to use the crop at all. Interestingly, kayos also appears in stories of survival during the Japanese occupation. Historical accounts tell of the Monovu tribe using the crop as food during the war, while its poisonous properties were reportedly used against Japanese soldiers.
Decades later, the memory of scarcity remains. The president of the farmers’ association told us that in the 1970s, when food was again difficult to come by, kayos became an important source of food for their community. Once processed into flour, it could be prepared in different ways depending on what a household had. The same crop that had helped sustain families during wartime remained part of their food repertoire years later.
Then there was bisol, a local variety of taro. The farmers cooked it with coconut milk, fresh coconut water, grated young coconut, and either salt or sugar. They explained that salt was often the choice in earlier years, when families living in the mountains had no electricity or refrigerators. What seemed like a simple preference was, in fact, a practice shaped by necessity.
Listening to them, I began to see that these foods carry the histories of the places and people that have lived with them. A root crop is never simply a root crop. What it means, and what it is worth, is shaped by the knowledge passed between generations, the hands of the people who learn to prepare and preserve it, the environment that sustains it, and the circumstances that have taught them when and how to depend on it.
In Sitio Ballo, agrobiodiversity lives in these everyday practices. Their stories made me wonder what happens when a crop remains in the field, but the knowledge that makes it edible, useful, and meaningful disappears. Perhaps resilience is not simply the presence of many crops, but the relationships and knowledge that allow people to live with them.
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"Roots Take Many Forms" is SEARICE's official entry to Agrobiodiversity as Roots of Resilience Photo Story Contest. It received a Public Voting Merit Award. The photo story is captured and written by Tin Maguddayao, SEARICE's Program Officer for Policy and Advocacy.
