The natives principally eat fish, but there is besides a large quantity of beef and pork consumed by them, which are always procurable, except on Fridays, when some little difficulty may be experienced in procuring flesh, as there is only enough killed on the morning of that day to supply the wants of the invalids. The country-fed pork is seldom or never seen at the tables of Europeans, these animals being too frequently allowed to feed in a most disgusting manner; and many pigs may at any time be seen in the suburbs of the town where the Indians dwell roaming about the streets, and efficiently performing the duties of scavengers, by removing the filth and garbage from many of these remote streets.
But notwithstanding their knowing, and in fact daily seeing, this gross and disgusting mode of feeding, it is the most universal and favourite food of the Chinese at Manilla, and is also a favourite with the Indians.
The continued use of pork so fed not unfrequently produces a skin disease called sarnas, something resembling itch.
Fowls, turkeys, and ducks, both tame and wild, are at all times procurable, the supplies of the latter being from the Laguna. Geese are seldom or never exposed for sale, but are sometimes sent from China to private persons merely for their own consumption.
It is a curious thing that geese will not produce eggs, or sit upon them to hatch their young, at Manilla; and it is also a sufficiently odd circumstance, that turkeys die in a short time after reaching Singapore, where they are sometimes sent to private individuals for domestic use, although they thrive very well both in the Philippines and in Java. At Singapore, however, after being a few days ashore, some of them are attacked by a peculiar sickness, apparently giddiness of the head, which invariably ends in death in a few minutes after the commencement of the attack. All these birds are subject to it at that place, if allowed to go about too long before being seized upon by the cook.
The principal food of the Indians being rice, it is found exposed for sale, in large and small quantities, in the bazaars, where nearly all the kinds of fruits of the season may also be found. The catalogue of fruits grown in the islands is a long one, but among those most commonly seen may be reckoned plantains of all kinds, of which there are an immense variety; mangoes, which are remarkably good, and superior to any species grown in the East, excepting those of Bombay, to which they are equal; the custard-apple, the pine-apple, seldom equal to those of Batavia or Singapore; limes, and oranges, not very good, and greatly inferior to those of China, from whence some are imported by the trading Spanish vessels constantly running between the two places; melons of different kinds, of middling quality; cucumbers, pumpkins, jackfruit, lanzones, and many other sorts.
