Banana Ketchup, Happy Meals for Adults, and more

Award-winning food writer Corby Kummer joined Boston Public Radio on Monday to share the story of food scientist Maria Orosa, the Filipino inventor of banana ketchup.

Orosa was born in Taal, Philippines, in 1893, and became a U.S. government-sponsored scholar at 23, traveling to the U.S. to earn her bachelor’s and master’s in chemistry and pharmaceutical science at the University of Washington at Seattle. Though she was offered a job by the State of Washington, Orosa returned to her native Philippines to join the government’s Bureau of Science to create a variety of new local foods and tools: flour from bananas and cassava, earthenware palayok ovens, soybean drink Soyalac, and more.

Perhaps Orosa’s most beloved creation was banana ketchup. After the U.S. colonized the Philippines in 1898, imports like ketchup became expensive — and tomatoes proved hard to grow in the tropical climate. Orosa developed banana ketchup using local saba bananas, sugar, vinegar, a variety of spices, and red food coloring.

“She was like the Booker T. Washington of the Philippines, finding ways of using native-grown products in the Philippines to help feed people on a much broader scale,” Kummer said.

In the wide-ranging discussion, Kummer also discussed the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, and McDonald’s new Happy Meal for adults.

Corby Kummer is executive director of the Food and Society policy program at the Aspen Institute, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.