Here, we will get into the colonization of the Philippines and how Spanish/American influence evolved Filipino cuisine further. The Philippines was colonized by Spain in the later 1560’s by a man named Magellan. He would claim the Philippines for Spain but would not be the one to create permanent settlements; that would be Miguel Lopez di Legazpi. Under him and over the course of the next 300 years, the Spaniards would bring a plethora of influences to the Philippines, cooking techniques, religion, architecture, agricultural efficiency methods, and even newer ingredients like livestock cattle, pigs, and chickens. One of the more staple methods of cooking they brought with them would be roasting and spit-roasting meats (mainly pigs), and the farming of livestock for food (Fernandez 2012, 88). Previously, the Filipino people simply hunted boars and caribou, but did not keep them as livestock, the Spaniards changed that and introduced them to livestock farming, allowing a more stable influx of meat to be available to the Filipino people. The introduction of roasting also gave rise to a commonly well-known dish, adobo. Spaniards originally brought over what was called adobar, which was like adobo in that it was roasted pork using vinegar. The Filipino people would take that dish and use soy sauce instead of vinegar and other spices native to the Philippines and create adobo (Fernandez 2012). The Spanish would also bring about various spices such as chilis, which is an important ingredient in Spanish salsa, to the Philippines causing the “Filipino people to now incorporate those spices in their signature sauces” (Halili 2004, 103). Albeit this paper is mainly about food, the other influences the Spaniards brought, mainly religion, did have some sort of bearing on the food culture and cuisine of the Philippines. For instance, the Spaniards brought over Catholicism and its beliefs in Christmas and Easter. Largely popular to Catholicism’s customs, paella, a rice dish with some sort of protein usually seafood, would be adapted into Filipino cuisine and changed a tad to suit the taste of the Filipino people. Also, along with the dishes associated with religion came the celebration events of those religions. Easter and Christmas would have special feasts like kamayans associated with them give the people a sense of community and social interaction, and place where they can eat and celebrate together. Although architecture didn’t have an exact influence on food, one could say the newly built structures provided new places for others to come together to eat, or to celebrate. As you can see, the Spaniards had quite an influence on early Filipino cuisine and help give rise to many popular dishes we know today due to bringing about new ways of cooking, farming, and even bringing unknown ingredients such as chilis to the Philippines. Spanish colonial rule although somewhat brutal in nature, did help transform and evolve Filipino cuisine for the better. 

Spanish colonial rule would end around the 1890’s due to the intervention of the United States of America (US Department 2000). The United States would take part in the “Spanish-American War of 1898, where the United States alongside the Filipino people would wage war to remove Spanish colonizers from power” (US Department 2000, 1). This would ultimately lead to the removal of Spanish rule; however, would open another door to American occupation as “When the battles were over, and the Filipinos claimed independence from foreign invaders, the American forces began clashing with the Filipinos over colonial control over the islands, tending to refer to the Filipino resistance as an “insurrection” rather than a bid for freedom from foreign invaders” (US Department 2000, 1). So, although they once fought together, the Philippines’ new ally has now gone and seized control of all the Spaniards had lost initiating a new era of influence to the cuisine of the Philippines. With their new occupational rulers, the Filipinos were introduced to new types of food industry, being processed foods and canned foods, and later being introduced to restaurant structures. To start off, the introduction of processed and canned goods would cause a shift in convenience foods for the Filipinos. “Due to it being a global trend at the time, processed and canned foods would change the Filipinos approach to meal preparation becoming staples in Filipino housholds and gradually moving the cuisine to include more convenient food goods” (Halili 2004, 111). This shift would include the usage of things like SPAM, other canned meats (think things like Vienna sausages), canned vegetables like peas, corn, and potatoes. Convenient items like this would help shift the cuisine landscape from farming most of their ingredients to buying convenient commodity food items, as it would save time as well as the effort to have to constantly maintain crops and/or livestock. However, this shift would also cause an issue still prevalent today. Due to processed foods and canned foods generally being unhealthy, they have become staples in Filipino diets. In a table compiled by Verafiles, it shows around 6-17% of the population of Filipinos aged 8 months to 18 years old, have one of 5 processed foods as a staple portion of their diet every day. These 5 being, salt crackers, hotdogs, three-in-one coffee, instant noodles, and soft drinks. I can attest to this as a lot of families and even my wife’s tended to move toward (at least for breakfast) more processed goods like Tender Juicy, a brand of processed red hotdogs created in the Philippines. With that brand alone you can already see the cuisine shift the American influence brought to the Philippines. An example of canned foods my wife and I frequent in the Philippines would be Pure Foods Corned beef hash, which is quite delicious albeit VERY bad for you, but that is just an example of available canned goods today. Traditional meals such as tapsilog, a breakfast consisting of garlic rice, a fried egg, and smaller stir-fried beef cuts, would be replaced with a convenient version of “Spam-silog” due to being easier than having to buy beefs and cut it up and store leftovers. Although the Americans brought convenience, they did also bring over dishes such as spaghetti; however, the Filipinos would modify the original recipe, exchanging tomato sauce for a sauce based around banana ketchup, and exchanging meatballs for hotdogs (Davila 2018, 120). As has been the trend, the Philippines takes in influence “adapts it, then subsumes it into the food culture” (Fernandez 2012, 219). Similarly, fast food items would begin to become popular in the later years of occupation along with the rise of restaurant style dining. Things like fried chicken, burgers, hotdogs, and other staples in fast food cuisine would become commonplace amongst Filipino cuisine; however, the Filipinos would still try to incorporate their own ingredients to create a fast food with unique flavors that suit the tastes of the Filipino people. The occupation would “end in 1946 when the Treaty of Manila would be signed by  Harry Truman, giving the Filipinos their independence from foreign bodies” (The Philippines, 2025, 3). Globalization of foreign foods within the Philippines would also begin to occur more prevalently during American occupation; however, I will get to that in the next point. Overall, colonization and occupation, albeit brutal in their nature, did bring about an evolution to the Filipino cuisine, included in that evolution would be new ways of cooking, recipes, and even commodity foods and restaurants that the Filipinos would adapt to their own tastes.