The Philippine countryside is crammed with coconut trees. Even our neighborhood, Katugasan, which is so named because tugas (molave) used to be thick in the area, is overrun with towering coconut trees. Of course, we don’t bewail this fact. The tree has several uses. The trunk can be lumber. The fruits can be eaten, used for its tono or to produce virgin coconut oil, or, if left alone until mature, made into copras. The husks can be used to polish the floor or scrub pots and pans. The palwa can be firewood. The midribs can be collected to become brooms. The bulig can be tapped for tuba or lambanog And the lukay; well, they are a permanent sight during Palm Sundays, when young, yellow-green fronds are fashioned into crosses or weaved in and out in a variety of designs for the priest to bless with holy water.
In our country, especially in the islands of the Visayas, the leaves of the coconut palm have secular uses as well. They are as versatile as the tree they come from. They can be made into thatches or shingles which, though not as durable as nipa, are sturdy enough to provide shelter from the elements for one in need of it. For kids, however, their uses are almost exponential. Coconut leaves can be eyeglasses, watches, rings, belts, whistles, and, not to forget, balls for games of rizal-rizal that can cover two or three neighborhoods and last well into the twilight or until mothers call.
But there is one more thing that the dabong nga lukay can be used for. It is a use that is pervasive in contemporary Visayan pop culture, for anyone who eats barbecue or ngoyong, and that stretches back to generations upon generations of our forebears and, perhaps, even into our pre-Hispanic past.
Long before the invention of the plastic cellophane, or of Tupperware, we Filipinos had the pusó. Hanging rice, so they call it in English these days.
Not only is it a convenient way to carry cooked rice from one place to another, cooking rice as pusó also makes it aromatic, much like the practice of putting pandan leaves in a pot of rice. Yet another plus to the pusó is that it keeps longer than pot-cooked rice, presumably since it is handled less.
But is the pusó indigenous to the Philippines? Or is it something we share with the rest of our Southeast Asian neighbors? They have similar ways of using leaves to package food. As we do with a number of our suman. But do they have our pusó? I do not have the answer to this question. But whether it is unique to the Philippines or not, we Boholanos strongly identify with it.
