S5E9: Manila Starves!

Ever heard of CC'd rice? No, not CC'd with a G. CC'd with a D. We all know what CC'd is. Pork cheek, ears, and belly, chili and onions, all minced and crisp and popping on a wickedly hot metal plate, seasoned with chili and calamansi and if you're some sort of blasphemous CC'd heathen, egg, and mayonnaise. Give the tasty dish with rice on the side and boy have you got one heck of a meal, CC'd rice. Here's food documentarian Erwin Husea, taking a trip up to Pampanga to visit the Mecca of modern CC'd. So obviously we had to come to Adi Loosing in Pampanga. This is where it all started. CC'd obviously was a dish already. All she did was really refine it and by grilling pork bits and kind of like burning and charring them first and then adding that to vinegar, it changed everything. And now they're also served on sizzling plates. Let's try it out. It's really soft. But what is CC'd rice? Well, CC'd means dive and that's exactly how you would harvest this special grain. See, back in the 1940s, during the initial Japanese air raids on Manila, a number of merchant ships sunk to their watery graves on the bottom of the harbor. As World War II wore on, food became scarcer and scarcer and desperate Manileños dove deep down to the bottom of the bay to recover sacks of rice that had been trapped inside their wrecked holds. This was CC'd rice and according to one economic historian, it ranks among one of the most revolting and degrading memories of wartime hardship. Getting your hands on CC'd rice was no easy feat. Manila Bay has an average depth of around 17 meters which meant you had to free dive pretty far down to reach the twisted hulls of the sunken ships. Not only that, you had to pull out sacks of rice from inside a virtual labyrinth of twisted hull plates and cratered compartments. After the war, a tando carpenter recalled seeing CC'd rice divers emerging from the water with blood leaking out of their ears. Many of them even became deaf. Because the sacks had been buried in silt and steel and saltwater for more than a year, the grain inside was at best disgusting. To make it edible, you had to boil it long enough for the smell to go away and then fry it with lots of garlic to mask the rank flavor even further. Ginger could also help, but as one young survivor remembered after the war, if you farted after eating CC'd rice, people a block away would pass out from the smell. Despite its revolting origins, CC'd rice became a prized commodity in the city's wartime black market. That was how desperate things had gotten in Japanese occupied Manila. Inside the capital city, food was running out. How would its citizens survive? Welcome to the Colonial Department. This is the podcast where we take long lost stories from Philippine colonial history and bring them to life. In this episode, we join the citizens of the Philippine capital during the darkest days of World War II and search desperately for something, anything to eat. This is Season 5, Episode 9, Manila Stars. In four decades of American rule, the population of the Greater Manila Area had exploded to three times its size. The Manila surveyed and said the 1903 census would hardly have recognized the bustling metropolis of 1939. There amidst the sweltering profusion of tranvias and coches and calesas, native born Manilenios in the fading ranks of the Spanish era old rich rubbed figurative shoulders with provincial migrants, American officials, and Chinese traders. Inside the steaming capital, the food was as varied as the people. Because its markets, you could buy Mandarin oranges grown in Batangas, Liempo from the stockyards of Laloma, fish salted and dried in Tondo, beef from the highlands of Bukidnon, oysters nurtured in Binakayan, rice milled in Cabanatuan, canned sardines packed in California, ham hocks cured in China, milk sterilized in Switzerland, apples picked from trees in the American Northwest, mutton imported from Hong Kong, pastries made with flour from Australia. What if you didn't feel like cooking and wanted a night around town? Well, you could eat a double-flying saucers at the aristocrat or steamed fish wrapped in banana leaves at the Manila Hotel or a hearty steak at Tom's Dixie Kitchen or sandwiches at Botica Boy or oven-roasted asado at Panciteria Lido or even just balut from street hawkers. If you had the means and the munchies, Manila offered a veritable feast. And then the Japanese arrived. December 1941, mere weeks after Pearl Harbor, Imperial troops were drawing closer and closer to the capital. The day after Christmas, General Douglas MacArthur declared Manila an open city. Then, the US military opened up all their warehouses. They didn't want the Japanese to commandeer any leftover stockpiles. And so, the great looting began. Citizens descended unmasked to the warehouses of South Harbor and began carrying off everything they could find. As one survivor recounted after the war, even bulky items like sacks of flour and drums of oil were carried off. Japanese and Chinese stores were also targeted by looters. Later on, even the Red Cross warehouses weren't spared. The looting continued for one straight week, right into the new year. And so, for a while, many residents of Manila ate better than they'd ever had in their entire lives. But that didn't last long. When the Japanese arrived, they put a stop to the pillage and then they began to hoard stocks for themselves. Even traveling peddlers called viajeros could have their goods confiscated by centuries-manning checkpoints, especially stocks of rice, which could only be shipped in or out by the authorities. Outside the city, the war had wrecked farms and supply lines. Farmers had abandoned their fields during the Japanese advance, and at the height of harvest season, the palae fields lay fallow. The Japanese commandeered fuel, which meant that trucks and ships couldn't chug along their usual routes. Corruption, guerrilla groups, and a wildly seesawing economy chewed off even more chunks from our agricultural output. Outside Manila, merchant ships from the allied countries stopped shipping goods to the Philippines. Shortly after the occupation of the capital, it was becoming clear that Manila would soon run out of food. Rations were enforced, of course. Neighborhood associations were put in charge of distribution. To qualify for rations, you needed a resident certificate and an infinite amount of patience to wait in line. The wait to buy food at neighborhood stores got so long that people began to joke about living in Pilapinas, the country of never-ending queues. Even if you could get to the front of the line, your money grew increasingly worthless as prices shut up. By 1943, the prices of food were uncontrollable, with the food price index doubling and then doubling again in a span of a few months. When the U.S. retaliatory air raids began in August 1944, the food price index was a whopping 10,900% higher than its 1941 levels. The wartime government nominally set price controls, but practically no one followed them. If you tried showing a vendor, the official prices of rice published in the newspaper did laugh at your face and tell you to try buying rice from the newspaper office instead. Residents both local and foreign were forced to sell nearly everything they had just to put food on the table. Affluent families looked sadly on as their pianos and jewels and appliances were carted away into the so-called buy-and-sell trade, while everyone else had to barter away most of their possessions including the clothes on their back. Others meanwhile risked life and limb to sneak in food from the provinces and into the city. Right before the train pulled up at the Tutuban station terminal, smugglers would leap off the moving carriages. The rice they hid inside their bags and clothes would inevitably end up in the black market where hoarders and speculators made a killing. Manileños had to do what they had to do. They learned to eat vegetables whole including their roots and branches. They stretched their meager stores of rice by turning them into porridge or mixing them with corn or cassava. They mixed water with their one egg so that it could feed up to six people. They roasted coconut meat and jokingly called it castanyog because burnt niog or coconut meat somehow tasted like chestnuts or castanias. They fired up corn until it turned black, poured hot water over it, and called it coffee. They also had to resort to desperate measures to get their protein. As one survivor recounted, "Before the war, people were afraid of dogs. During the war, dogs were afraid of people." Dogs and cats disappeared from the streets and even rats weren't spared. Even rodents were sold in markets under the name "star meat" because, you know, "star is rats" spelled backwards. But the real hero that saved many Manileños from starvation was undoubtedly the lowly camote or sweet potato. Root crops like these are uniquely suited to lean times. They're easy to grow. They are nutritionally dense. They don't need a lot of land or water and even when they ripen, you can leave them on the ground for a long time and just dig them up when you need a meal. All over Manila, citizens planted camote in whatever plots of land they could find. In a city as urbanized as the capital was, it probably didn't amount too much and it was definitely a come down from a Tom Dixie steak or an aristocrat adobo. But hey, that camote could keep you alive. Manileños cracked bitter jokes about their empty stomachs. You heard the Pilapinas joke a few minutes ago. Here's another one that was making the rounds among the hungry Manileños. In Philippine history, the joke starts, the Spanish brought religion. The Americans, they brought "educación". What did the Japanese bring? Ration. But by December 1944, no one was laughing anymore. People on the brink of starvation crowded the streets, waiting to die. As one writer put it, "On the sidewalks hobbled the wretched wrecks of humanity, beggars of all ages, cadaveras in their tattered rags or jute sacks, gathering the last morsel of food with the smell of festering, putrid leg ulcers permeating the air." Trucks had to go out on the streets daily to clear the corpses away. For those still alive, the line between the haves and the have-nots was razor-sharp. Roving bands of starving beggars marched straight up to houses, looted warehouses and broad daylight, or attacked anyone they saw carrying rice. The Japanese also forced the government of President Laurel to abandon the capital and hold up in the mountain city of Baguio. In the last months of the war, Manila teetered on the brink of chaos and only one thought smoldered inside its resident's minds, "Survive." Thanks for listening to this episode of The Colonial Department. Find us on Instagram and TikTok for more history, behind-the-scenes, and non-fiction book recommendations. If you want to know more about the propaganda the Japanese fed the Filipinos during World War II, listen to Season 1, Episode 11, "Lights, Camera, Colonialism." Liu Mengubat wrote, narrated, and produced this episode, Anya Ong Reyes' Red Quotations from Sources. Audio of the seasick door was taken from Feature. References include 1. Daniel Doppers' 2016 book, "Feeding Manila in Peace and War" on the economic and food history of the capital city. 2. Eduardo T. Jose's book, "The Japanese Occupation," published in the multi-volume Kaisai Science series. 3. Doreen Fernandes' essay, "Surviving of the Land."