In some high-end restaurants, an order of stewed native chicken, the tinolang manok, is expensive. At Bankerohan Public Market, Davao City’s biggest souk, bisayang manok (literally, Visayan chicken) costs nearly double per kilo than the feeds-induced chicken served at your nearest food chain. In fact, soup from free-range chickens is good for colds if served piping hot.
When Portuguese-born explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition arrived in the Philippines, one of the observations Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta wrote in the voyage’s diary was the fondness of the people from Islas de Pintados (tattooed people) for cockfighting. Of course, Islas de Pintados refers to the Visayas and cockfights belong to roosters.
But there’s more to chicken than just food and sport. The animal, wild or domestic, has its roots in the country. In 2014, the American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences came out with a definitive article claiming the origins and dispersal of Polynesian chickens have been traced to the Philippines, and that there’s a likelihood our archipelago could be the “ancestral homeland of the Polynesians whose forebears colonized the Pacific about 3,000 years ago.”
The linguistic similarity of Polynesians to the Bagobo dialect was already observed in 1914. Helen Herron Taft, wife of US governor-general in the Philippines Howard Taft, in her Recollections of Full Years wrote of an incident which caused her to comment on “the relation between the Polynesian language of Samoa and the vernacular of the hill tribes around the Davao gulf.”
A summary of the study done by an international team of researchers from the Australian Center for Ancient DNA (ACAD), at the University of Adelaide in ScienceDaily. The scientists mapped out the origins and dispersal of the early migrations of the Polynesians and the chickens they brought along in their voyage.
“Polynesian seafarers explored vast areas of the Pacific and settled nearly every inhabitable island in the Pacific Ocean well before European explorers arrived in the 16 th century. However, the ancestral relationships of people living in the widely scattered islands of the Pacific Ocean have long puzzled anthropologists. The predominant theory is that the Polynesian people are a subset of the sea-faring Austronesian people who have their origins in Taiwan, having arrived there through South China about 8000 years ago. From there it is believed that the spread out across the Pacific to Polynesia, a sub-region made up of over 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean.
“It is thought that by roughly 1400 BC, the ‘Lapita People’, so-named after their pottery tradition, appeared in the Bismark Archipelago of northwest Melanesia. This culture is seen as having adapted and evolved through time and space since its emergence ‘Out of Taiwan’. Within a mere three or four centuries between about 1300 and 900 BC, the Lapita archaeological culture spread 6,000 km until it reached as far as Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa.”
The observation was reached after tracing the old genetic signature of chickens to belong exclusively to the Philippines and neighboring regions. While they argued the islands could be only a stopover for ancient mariners, the migration patterns recently posited almost conclusively point out that Polynesians could be migrants from the Philippines.
Of course, some chickens are endemic to the Philippines. Like the domestic chicken which has been traced as a progeny of the red jungle fowl, the Pinoy free-range chicken has been bred to infuse speed and create better fighting strains for fighting cocks. For a country that has been host to the World Slasher, the Olympics of cockfighting, cocks or chickens in general have been part of Filipino culture long before the art of cockfighting made it to the books.
Among the popular native chicken species are the banaba from the provinces of Batangas, Cavite, Laguna, and Rizal; the bolinao from Pangasinan; the camarines from Bicol; the darag from Panay Island and certain islands in the Visayas; the joloanon from Sulu; the parawakan from Palawan, Mindoro, Marinduque, and Romblon; and the patani, a rare chicken with black meat that herbularios use for treating persons afflicted with bad spirits.
There are five main chicken species, namely: the red jungle fowl, green jungle fowl, grey jungle fowl, Ceylon jungle fowl and the extinct Sumatran jungle fowl. Once found in the eastern part of India, the lower parts of the Himalayas, in Indochina, from the middle of to northern China, and southern and eastern regions of Asia, the wild jungle fowl’s population has spread fast and its easy domestication has made them the favorite animal for breeding in farms.
Finally, there’s one caution when eating the modern-day poultry, the kind that regularly lands on your plate and sold in food chains; they are high in estrogen. Dr. Mark Rosenberg of Food-Trients says several of his patients, as a result of eating chicken injected with fast-growing medicines, have been experiencing “estrogen dominance,” the condition when the body gets too much estrogen that causes “a whole domino-effect of problems.”
He advises: “Too much estrogen in a woman’s body can increase her risk for breast and endometrial cancers, fibroid tumors and ovarian cysts and disrupt normal menstrual cycles,” adding that the same experience affects his male patients.
In fact, estrogen dominance imbalances in male results in “erection difficulty, depression, the gaining of belly fat, increased male breast tissue, or ‘man boobs’. Worse… too much estrogen in a man’s system puts him at higher risk for developing prostate cancer as well.”
According to urban legend, estrogen is blamed for the growing ‘gay population.’
