Christmas fruit salad debate: canned or fresh?

It’s nearing that time of the year when Filipinos will be stocking up on canned fruit cocktail for their Noche Buena and Christmas Day fruit salad. Not me. But I’m pretty sure my husband will buy a can or two. He belongs to the tribe of pro-canned fruit cocktail for making fruit salad. I prefer mine with fresh fruits.

We always have this discussion during Christmas season. Even if I make fresh fruit salad, he will still likely make a small batch of canned-fruit-cocktail-salad. The kind he and I both grew up with.

Throughout my childhood, and even after I was no longer a child, Christmas and New Year were never without fruit salad made with canned fruit cocktail. At our house, at my grandparent’s house, at the house of uncles and aunts…

For a long time, I accepted its presence as being part of Christmas tradition. Not until later, much later, when I was already a mother and we had moved into our own house, did I wonder why, with the abundance of fresh fruits throughout the year, we were making fruit salad with canned fruit.

It’s colonial mentality, really. Our parents both belonged to the generation called Baby Boomers, after all. In the Philippines, that means people who were born during the American colonial period or who grew up with the remnants of the colonial culture. They loved canned food. Canned meat, canned fruit, canned everything — a symbol of affluence for many of them. And that mentality was passed on to their children and grandchildren.

As un-Filipino as it may seem, I detest canned fruit cocktail — especially as the main ingredient of fruit salad and especially when the fruit salad is soupy.

An as un-Filipino as it may sound, Filipino fruit salad made with canned fruits is not as Filipino as most like to think. It is actually an adaptation of an American sweet salad called ambrosia which I made once, out of curiosity but refusing to use canned fruits, then swore I would never ever repeat the mistake of making that abomination ever again.

But just how did this love for canned fruit develop among Filipinos?

Prior to the American colonial period, canned food was practically unknown in the Philippines. Yes, food preservation was already being practiced (did you know that cooking meat into adobo was actually a method of lengthening the shelf life of meat during the pre-refrigeration era?) but food in sealed cans was something that America brought to our shores.

The invention of canned food is closely associated with war. In the United States, large scale wars during the 19th century, including the Civil War, boosted the food canning business. During World War I, canned food production soared as a result of high demand to feed soldiers posted overseas.

Was canned fruit cocktail introduced by the Americans to the Philippines during World War I? Even earlier, actually, and even while the Philippine-American War was raging. That was the time when history professor Bernard Moses was appointed member of the U.S. Philippine Commission (1900 to 1902).

Moses brought his wife, Edith, to the Philippines. Edith, with her condescending air of White superiority, wrote a book, Unofficial letters of an official’s wife, where she mentioned canned food more than once as she preferred it over local produce which, she feared, was too unsanitary. There is a specific reference to her preference for canned fruit over fresh local mangoes.

So, yes, American canned fruit was already in the Philippines prior to World War I. But, apparently, during the early decades of American colonial rule in the Philippines, food stuff brought in from America was only accessible to Americans living in the Philippines and the “elite” they were hobnobbing with.

It was the aftermath of World War II that made canned fruit cocktail salad a fixture in Filipino homes.

The Philippines gained “independence” from the United States after World War II. But the Americans never really left. American culture had taken deep roots in the Philippines. An education system patterned after the American model was in place. So were Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base.

The presence of the bases meant the continued presence of American military personnel in the Philippines. And that, in turn, meant the continuous influx of American food, canned and otherwise, to feed the Americans with flavors from home. American supply surplus, food and non-food, was sold in what came to be known as PX (post exchange) stores inside and outside the bases.

A new Filipino middle class, educated American style, was hungry for PX goods. Home economics lessons have inculcated in the minds of the Filipinos that processed food, including canned food, was superior and more sanitary than fresh food available in the local markets. Those who could afford the prices frequented the PX stores where they bought canned food from America. I KNOW because my parents and parents-in-law, and their contemporaries, were among those regular customers.

This middle class, wittingly or unwittingly, became a role model for the rest of the Filipino people. Their insatiable appetite for American goods was emulated. But because of the huge discrepancy between the price of American goods and the buying capacity of the average Filipino, American food, including canned fruit cocktail, was reserved for special occasions.

So, there. If your Christmas food shopping list still includes canned fruit cocktail for your fruit salad, perhaps it’s high time you rethink your holiday menu.