Wild Plant Foods

Prewar Buguias was endowed with several wild fruits and vegetables. Brambleberries and huckleberries were abundant in pastures and woodland clearings, and wild guavas grew thick in several dry grasslands. Children gathered most fruit, consuming the bulk forthwith but usually bringing some home for their families. The foremost wild vegetable was Solanum nigrum , a weed of abandoned dry fields. Buguias residents collected wild tomatoes and Capsicum peppers (both exotics), as well as watercress. They regarded mushrooms highly and sought them diligently, gathering over twenty different varieties, some in sufficient quantity for drying. But perhaps the most essential wild "food" plant was the cosmopolitan weed Bidens pilosa , which formed the base of bubud , the yeast cake used in making rice beer.

Only in famines were wild foods essential. A delay of the southwest monsoon could bring food shortages, and real hunger would ensue if drought persisted, as it once did, until July. A prolonged typhoon could also spoil the sweet-potato crop, thus depleting the essential food stock. Even a rat infestation could cause a food deficiency. During times of severe want, the Buguias people consumed the tubers of a drought-adapted pasture legume and the pithy centers of Miscanthus canes. In the harsh famine at the end of World War II, some individuals retreated to the oak forest to gather acorns. The standby food of hard times, however, was taro. Wild taro, common in higher elevation seeps, was edible if leached, and several varieties of cultivated taro survived well through the worst storms and droughts.