M E A T

Very early writings note that goats, carabaos and deer were the meats our ancestors hunted and ate.  Pork may have come from the wild boar, the "baboy damo" or jabali as the Spanish called it.

In my childhood days, pigs were almost all black with an occasional albino.  They were small with long snouts.  Someone taught me that the better breed was one that had a short snout and with limbs that were muscled even when it was young.

Today, what we have are cross-bred pigs that are best suited for our climate and yield excellent pork.  In fact, pork is the one item in today's markets that we can be proud of.



From the 1980s, the pork and poultry industries had big companies investing millions to produce the meats most popular in the Philippines.  It is cattle, however, that has not been cultivated enough to meet the demands of today's Filipinos.

Today, the quality of pork has improved, making it for tender probably due to the better distribution of fat in the meat.  Chicken, on the other hand, has become bland and less tasty than those which were grwon and marketed up to the 1950s.  Ducks and geese are still not available in steady quantities.  Pigeon raising was quite common in  most homes all over the Philippines but this practice seems to have decreased considerably.  Quails are raised mostly for eggs which are in demand in Chinese restaurants.  Among the sources of meat, it is cattle that seems to have been introduced later in our history.

Beef has undergone changes in marketing and concepts through the years.  It was believed that good beef had fat that was yellow. This was usually associated with Batangas beef, then and now still synonymous to high quality local beef.  I was also under the impression that beef in the country is different from those found abroad.

Those impressions, however, were corrected by Mr. Gerry Aranez, a specialist who fattens cattle in his own farm in Batangas for his stores to Metro Manila. From him I learned that yellow fat comes from cows that are past calf-bearing stage and are then slaughtered for beef.  Good beef should be cherry red in color and the fat should be white.  And from what Mr. Aranez has been producing in his farm, we know that quality beef comparable to that raised in Kobe, Japan, can be had here.