By PIO S. VERZOLA JR.

I’ll go straight to the point: this piece is about how sugarcane produced a revolt.

But first, let me tell you that my efforts at being an urban peasant (as confessed earlier in this column) is not a 100-percent flop. Despite my misgivings about the mossy cloud forest origins of our place, I’m glad to report that I’m now growing luxuriant plots of unas (sugarcane).

This, without the help of chemical fertilizer, pesticides, or irrigation. Just plain sugarcane, growing semi-wild on various corners of the yard. Sometimes, I throw wood ash and chicken droppings when I feel like it.

When the cane plants were beset by severe aphid infestation, I didn’t do anything, not even remove the infested leaves. In fact, I gave them permission to die. They didn’t. They merely shed off the diseased leaves, and grew more riotously on the rebound. I’m no biologist, but I think maybe individual plants can develop immunity like people do, if only we’d let them.

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Most farmers in Northern Luzon plant sugarcane as serious business, although on a small-scale basis. The sugarcane crop is usually planted in rotation or relay with rice and mongo or corn, with about 10,000-15,000 cuttings needed to plant a one-hectare field.

This urban peasant’s plot is puny in comparison, measured in a few square meters, but the sugarcane breaks the desolate barrenness of my “mossy cloud forest” backyard.

Kabsat Kandu couldn’t hide his curious interest this time. “In two, three months’ time, your unas will be ready for the dapil (native sugarcane mill),” he commented with a slight tinge of envy and nostalgia. “So when do we taste your basi (sugarcane wine)?”

Of course, my neighbor was just playing make-believe barrio fiesta. As far as I can see, there is neither a dapil to crush the cane, nor a carabao to drive the mill, within a two-kilometer radius from our house.

Also, while our barangay has more than its own share of elders and ritual occasions requiring basi to flow, I doubt whether basi is still being made within city limits. I think the supply comes mostly from the provinces. (I’d like to be proven wrong on both counts, though.)

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It’s not as if I’m always dying for a sip of basi.

Once, in college, I threw up a few basinfuls of stomach slop while slumped beside a revoltingly full toilet bowl in a Cubao folkhouse, where some friends and I had wanted to audition. Since then, I’ve basically sworn off all hard alcoholic drinks. I’d like to keep intact the limited number of functioning brain cells that I still have, thank you.

On annual events like New Year and reunions, I allow myself a bottle or two of beer or a shot of brandy. Or a goblet of red wine, especially if offered by a flight attendant on few occasions that I travel abroad. Sometimes I even forget to sip my drink. I seem to have acquired a psychic allergy to branded drinks, especially to bottles labeled by century-old Spanish corporate names.

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On top of that, I find the increasing spate of alcoholic commercials on TV very disgusting. It’s discomfiting enough for them to tantalize us with the ample, intoxicating charms of an Assunta de Rossi. But now they’re onto a still-younger market.

Remember the brand that adopted the catchy jingle, “Wala ka nang gatas sa labi. Kaya mo na ‘tol.” (The milk on your lips is gone. You can handle this now, bro’.) Meanwhile, another brand celebrates the father-and-son rituals of bonding-by-bottle – perhaps while the wives meekly retreat to the kitchen, comparing the whiteness of their laundry and tired floors.

Makes me want to throw up again, recalling that Cubao toilet smell.

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But there are two big exceptions to my self-imposed rule. One is tapuy (rice wine), which I make at home.

The other is basi, which is all the more precious as I don’t often get hold of it and I’ve never tried to make some myself. Basi is no longer mass-produced commercially, as far as I know. So at any rate I couldn’t get enough if I wanted to. Come to think of it, right now I’m dying for a sip.

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It hasn’t always been that way.

Long before the Philippines became a Spanish colony, the processing of sugarcane products was already a flourishing industry in Northern Luzon, especially in the Ilocos region. Farming communities planted sugarcane, and the harvested cane was crushed with carabao-driven wooden rollers (our good old dapil) to extract the sugary-sweet juice.

Then our ancestors cooked the liquid to produce brown sugar in syrupy or dried-cake from (ente, panotsa), vinegar (suka) and, of course, basi.

Farmers throughout Northern Luzon are still processing sugarcane into these products as a cottage industry, but no longer as widely as before. According to an old clipping taken from Agribusiness Weekly (issue dated Jan. 20-26, 1989), here’s how it was and is still being done:

Sugarcane is harvested and processed from November to March. The cut stalks are fed to the dapil’s two vertical wooden rollers. The farmer-miller crushes the stalks twice in the rollers, before he lets the crushed canes dry in the sun, for later use as fuel in cooking the juice. As the dapil’s rollers grind, the juice is collected by a bamboo trough into jars.

Four cartloads of cane can be processed by an indigenous mill in 12 hours. Each cartload produces a batch of about nine 30-liter jars, or about 270 liters of cane juice. #

(CONTINUED NEXT WEEK)