Maria Ylagan Orosa and the Chemistry of Resistance
In February 1925, tens of thousands of masked merrymakers thronged the streets of Manila to celebrate the city’s 18th annual Carnival. In between the balls and beauty pageants at Wallace Park, attendees wandered through a maze of exhibition booths showcasing the latest industrial and agricultural products from across the country. Crowds gathered around the Bureau of Science exhibition, which featured rows of canned Filipino fruits and vegetables. “It was the first time people in the Philippines had seen mangoes canned whole, and the numerous other fruits preserved, and city-wide interest was aroused,” noted The Honolulu Advertiser. The practice of canning was virtually non-existent in the Philippines. Imported canned goods were available at the time, but prohibitively expensive to all but the elite.
The exhibition showcased the research of Maria Ylagan Orosa, a chemist at the Bureau of Science who pioneered the canning of native fruits and vegetables, along with prepared delicacies such as adobo, dinuguan, and escabeche. As a passionate nationalist, she saw the food system as a vector of colonial control and worked tirelessly to help reduce the reliance on foreign imports. She nourished a nation through chemistry and culinary ingenuity, developing food products and preservation methods that highlighted the island’s abundant resources and paved a path towards self-sustainability. Although many of Orosa’s recipes continue to be commercially produced, her legacy has been obscured by corporate branding—replacing her life with a logo.
Maria Ylagan Orosa. Photo courtesy of the Orosa family.
“There are all these amazing women scientists like Orosa who are hidden in plain sight because of the way we teach history and present them in the media,” explains Catherine Ceniza Choy, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley when I spoke with her about Orosa’s work. “They’ve been acknowledged, but they aren’t given a three-dimensional full life that we can admire, relate to, and remember.”
“She nourished a nation through chemistry and culinary ingenuity, developing food products and preservation methods that highlighted the island’s abundant resources and paved a path towards self-sustainability.”
Born on November 29, 1893, Orosa’s formative years were shaped by the ferment of the Philippine Revolution and the Philippine-American War. Her father, Simplicio Orosa y Agoncillio, was part of the resistance movement led by General Aguinaldo against Spain and then the United States. As a steamship captain, he was tasked with clandestinely transporting Filipino soldiers and supplies.
Eventually, when Orosa was about 9 or 10, her father retired from his life at sea and with her mother, Juliana y de Castro, opened a store. Soon after, they fled their home Taal, Batangas to escape the cruelty of American occupying forces. But in seeking safety, the family aroused suspicion and Simplicio was taken as a political prisoner. These experiences appear to have left their mark on Orosa, endowing her with a deep sense of patriotic duty.
Her scientific education informed her food advocacy work. After a year at the University of the Philippines, Orosa transferred to the University of Washington in Seattle in 1916, where she completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in pharmaceutical chemistry, in addition to a bachelor’s degree in food chemistry.
She worked a series of odd jobs to pay for her tuition. While a product of economic necessity, her experiences outside of the classroom proved useful. She spent her summer breaks working at salmon canneries, learning about industrial preservation and packaging methods. During the school year, she worked as an assistant chemist in the Food Laboratory run by the Dean of the Pharmacy School. There, she tested the purity of samples brought in by State Food Inspectors.
Still, her path was not easy. She faced significant gender and racial barriers. Glimpses of these hardships can be seen in her letters home. For example, in a letter to her mother, she noted: “Here in America, it is very difficult to obtain the kind of job I have just been offered and accepted. Before they offer to a person of color, such as Filpino, Japanese or Chinese, the jobs are first offered to whites. So, I am indebted to Dean Johnson, that although I am a person of color, he offered me the job ahead of everyone else.”
She returned to the Philippines in 1922 and after a brief teaching stint at Centro Escolar University, joined the Bureau of Sciences, where she used her scientific skillset to address the problems of malnutrition and food insecurity. She experimented with preservation techniques like canning, dehydrating, fermenting, and freezing local produce and protein-sources, to maximize the utilization and conservation of domestic foods.
“The children of Simplicio Orosa y Agoncillo and Juliana Ylagan-Orosa, from left: Simplicia, Vicente, Sixto, Maria, Felisa, Jose, Nicolas and Rafael. Seated: Juliana Ylagan Orosa, voted in 1948 ‘Mother of the Year’ by the National Federation of Women’s Clubs of the Philippines for having reared eight achievers.” Photo courtesy of the the Orosa family.
Along with boosting the food supply, her innovations introduced new flavors and economic opportunities. For example, Orosa was the first person to freeze and can mangoes, enabling their exportation across the globe. She also studied and promoted the use of indigenous ingredients, the culinary potential of which had been sidelined and scorned through centuries of colonialism. She made flour from cassava, green bananas, and coconuts; fermented wine using native fruits and nuts; coaxed vinegar from pineapples; and transformed seaweed into agar.
She also mashed together saba bananas, brown sugar, vinegar, and spices, creating the now-iconic Filipino condiment banana ketchup as a replacement for imported tomato ketchup. In an interview with Evelyn Garica, one of Orosa’s living relatives, Evelyn recalls, “She came up with banana ketchup. Of course, this is branded now, but this is her invention. It’s a Filipino household must-have.” Choy also echoes the sentiment, stating, “Banana ketchup is not just a commercial success, but it’s [also] beloved by so many people throughout the world, especially the Filipino Diaspora.”
In total, Orosa is credited with over 700 recipes, many of which remain pillars of Filipino cuisine to this day. While many of her products have become fixtures in Filipino homes, Orosa is hardly a household name. In part, this was intentional. As a humanitarian, she believed knowledge was something to share, not sell. “When you start an experiment, finish it and write the results for others to use,” she often told her assistants. Her erasure was completed by corporations, who commodified her scientific contributions without acknowledging their origins.
“‘She took the best of American science, specifically chemistry, and used it in a way to serve Filipinos and the Philippine nation.’”
“There is a Filipino tradition of utilizing the land, the harvest, the fresh fruits and vegetables that are already native to the Philippines and the various animals of the sea. This centuries-long tradition was sort of interrupted by these layers of Spanish and United States historical colonization,” explains Choy. Orosa recognized the potential of agricultural byproducts. She championed the culinary and medicinal use of coconut sepal and darak (rice bran), which had been previously maligned as waste products and used as cheap animal feed.
“She was very conscious about food not going to waste. We’re a rice eating country so she found a use for rice bran. If you sift rice bran you’ll come up with a flour called Tiki-Tiki. It’s very nutritious and high in vitamins so she made cookies out of that,” says Garcia.
At a time where few women scientists were recognized for their contributions, the Philippine government supported and funded Orosa’s research. In 1927, the Legislature created the Division of Food Preservation and promoted Orosa to its Head. The following year, Orosa traveled around the world on government funding to study innovations in processing and packaging techniques. She then adapted these modern foreign techniques to fit the context and culture of the Philippines. “She took the best of American science, specifically chemistry, and used it in a way to serve Filipinos and the Philippine nation,” says Choy.
When World War II broke out, Orosa refused to evacuate with the rest of her family, opting instead to help feed those caught in the crossfire. The conflict cut off imports and disrupted agricultural production, resulting in widespread food shortages in the Philippines. To supplement the meager wartime rations, Orosa redirected her division’s resources into the creation of nutrient-dense food products. “To this day, we actually meet relatives that say ‘My grandfather survived the war because of Maria Y. Orosa,’” says Garcia.
She also served as a Captain in the Marking Guerrillas, one of the hundreds of underground Filipino units that battled the Japanese Occupation. Rather than fighting on the front lines, the swashbuckling scientist waged war in her laboratory. At her own expense, she prepared rations for the resistance movement and developed new packaging to suit their needs. She also organized a system for smuggling food into the University of Santo Tomas Prison camp.
A patriot until the end, Orosa died serving her country. On February 13, 1945, she was struck by shrapnel while working in her laboratory. She was rushed to the Malate Remedios Hospital, which was hit by a second shelling that killed an estimated 400 doctors and civilians, including Orosa. The Battle of Manila did not just take her life, but also obscured her legacy, destroying the manuscript she had been working on. Still, her spirit lives on through her culinary innovations which have fed, sustained, and connected the Filipino diaspora for over eight decades.
Image Credit: Portrait of Maria Ylagan Orosa courtesy of the Orosa family.
