Maria Orosa
Identity, creativity, and innovation
At Archipelago, we tell the overlooked American stories of how the minority has helped to shape the majority—of the generations of Filipino Americans whose contributions have impacted the culture we live in today.
One of our favorite stories to share is Maria Orosa’s.
A food chemist and innovator, Orosa is best known for being the inventor of banana ketchup, a condiment that Filipinos all over the world use everyday, but few know was something that that had come out of necessity during WW2. Her contributions don’t stop there. She was also a Guerilla fighter who used her knowledge to save in-prisoned Filipino soldiers from starvation by smuggling more of her inventions, Soyalac and Darak, in bamboo into Japanese-run concentration camps.
After the war, the Philippines struggled and families were hungry, She was a huge proponent of self-sufficiency being the way to uplift her people. She saw that the Philippines was heavily reliant on expensive imports (like tomatoes) and envisioned that the use of food and produce grown locally on the island nation would help her country thrive. She dedicated her life to studying native foods and introduced various preserving and fermentation techniques to educate and keep families fed and healthy. In a way, Archipelago’s approach to extreme locality is a continuation of her legacy. Moreover, finding ways to our cultures ferments and building blocks of taste through PNW ingredients is not only our way of bridging our home to the homeland of our immigrant parents, but to showcase how this approach can redefine and push the existing identity of our region’s culinary heritage.
Beyond a shared dedication to locality, Maria Orosa lies at the heart of what we do for her own incredible connection to our region. At the age of 23, before the war, Orosa had come to the States as a Pensionado or U.S. government sponsored student—during one of the first documented waves of Filipinos coming to this country. At the time the Philippines was a commonwealth of the U.S., allowing Filipino students to come as U.S. Nationals, and Orosa had been one of those students… finding herself just a few miles from us at the University of Washington. There, she earned a bachelors and a masters degree in pharmaceutical chemistry, as well as one in food chemistry. During her education, Maria would spend her summer breaks working in the Alaskan canneries. Though she earned a position as an assistant chemist for the state of Washington, she instead chose to return to the Philippines in 1922 to serve her country,
At Archipelago we are often confronted by the question of what is authentic, what is Filipino? Orosa reminds us that at some point, all dishes were once new, and that though we love and respect what we know, that creativity and innovation can push us to find something amazing.
sources: http://fanhs-national.org, https://food52.com , https://www.manilatimes.net