G-SPOT

By VIRGINIA J. PASALO

Real things

I walked to the market today. The market offers one of the most “real” encounters in everyday life, offering real vegetables, fish, meat fruits. And very real people.

We bought halaan, a kind of clam that lives in saltwater or brackish water, halfway buried in the sand of the sea floor or riverbeds, sandy mudflats, or estuaries. Halaan is frequently confused with tulya, freshwater clams found in rivers, lakes, and streams, called “bennek” by my late mother.

I was surprised to see small, live shrimps, the one my father used to gather from the river which he mixes with kalamansi (Philippine lime), siling labuyo (wild chili or Philippine bird’s eye chili), sukang Iloko (Ilocos vinegar), pinitpit ya agat (smashed ginger) and rock salt. The rivers were clean then, and I didn’t hesitate to try the salad even if it burned my tongue and the tiny shrimps danced like tipsy drunks inside my mouth.

It was tempting to buy familiar vegetables from the provinces, mostly from the North, and some from Cavite and other nearby vegetable baskets. Balintawak is the main drop-off point for many fresh produce, where most restaurants buy their ingredients, at the lowest price. Most of the vendors speak Ilocano, Pangasinan, Tagalog, and one or two would speak in English, jokingly, imitating the British accent, and everybody laughs, as they flip their polished fingernails in the air, saying, “Charot!”

My sister Emma didn’t find gelatinous corn, the small white variety which we used to buy in Binalonan on the way home to Pozorrubio. If she did, she would not miss buying, even if it costs more than the saba (sweet plantain) and the “magic kamote” a variety of Philippine sweet potato that has a cream-beige peel but turns a vibrant purple when cooked, similar to that sold in the market as the Okinawan purple sweet potato in English (Beni imo in Japanese), or in some markets, referred to as the Hawaiian sweet potato.

We found galunggong (mackerel scad or round scad), sold in very affordable “tumpok” or “atado” (pile), a cheaper option instead of buying per kilogram. Galunggong is a staple fish in the Philippines often used for making tinapa (smoked fish). The price of galunggong was used as a political barometer for inflation and to indicate the economic status of the country. During the 1986 snap elections, the late President Corazon Aquino’s battlecry was to bring down the rising cost of galunggong. Years after, a similar battlecry, the “tilapia legacy”, was made by former President Gloria Arroyo, who promised to make the tilapia (St. Peter’s fish) the most affordable staple fish, available to even the poorest families by the time she stepped down from office. These two  women leaders, they knew their priorities.

Food security is a more pressing priority than “Build, build, build”. Infrastructure is useless without anything to transport but tourists. If these are built at all. As it is, we’re still importing rice, because our rice fields were flooded as a result of unfinished or non-existent flood control projects amounting to billions.

These, to me, are the real things. Things you can touch and smell and haggle with. Things that we should focus our efforts on, considering the global crisis we’re in. Things we have to produce to lessen our dependence on imported products. We can’t just Facebook it, take photos of food for content, and become consumers of goods peddled on social media, or rely on promises made by politicians.