Sweet-salty – and deadly

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

So there. Among the “latest” health and wellness findings to hit the public is the one about the supposed secret food manufacturers employ to make you eat and eat, therefore fattening their pockets as well as literally fattening you up to obesity.

This secret is very simple: combine the sweet and the salty in one food. This way, the taste is no longer monotonous and you keep coming back for more servings. Indeed, it is one “secret” our old folks used to do to ensure a good meal, where the food is finished up down to the last morsel – put the sweet and the salty side by side so that guests do not hit satiation point, which is really at its heart, killing our natural markers that are supposed to tell us to put that fork down, you’re full.

They called it, in the dialect, “sum-od”, the point where we can’t take more food because we feel we have more than enough, and to shove some more would make us puke. This is why, while butter is such a yummy flavor, you cannot eat lots of it in one blow. You’ll hit your satiation point, your “sum-od” marker, and forcing yourself to take in some more or even just to look at the object of your “sum-od” is enough to make the hairs on your hands or at the back of your neck stand.

These days, with brilliant tricks in the manufacturers’ kitchen, this natural marker that signals our brains enough is enough has been torn down. In case you haven’t noticed it yet, the only marker for fullness that we have now is when we feel our stomachs are full and bursting with food.

Worse, the study shows there are hideous examples that even hide the salt so well, you don’t really taste them, but you keep taking in what you think is just a sweet bar. Many of these, it is said, are chocolate bars and candies.

Conversely, there are also supposedly salty foods that actually pack plenty of sugar in them but you don’t exactly taste the sweet immediately, so you simply keep eating. This is particularly true with hams and preserved meats where the taste of sugar is not exactly obvious.

But, of course, there are foods that really play with the salty and the sweet, and the advice is to steer clear of them because it will not be easy to get away from them.

Ever noticed how that salted butter caramel is such a bitch you can’t stop putting a bit in your mouth, and a bit, and a bit, and a bit….? It’s the salty and the sweet playing on your tongue, each one cancelling each other’s monotony, making it possible for you to endlessly chew or munch on them.

This is the reason why somebody loves to put salty bits of tabagak flakes in his brazos de Mercedes, to provide that interesting and different edge to this sweet dessert – to kill the “sum-od” and keep him eating.

There is also now sea salt ice-cream, which is really ice cream with rough beads of salt that provide a counterpoint to the sweet creaminess of the whole thing. A whole slew of sweet-salty foods have been concocted, and along with their popularity, obesity has exploded as an epidemic.

Like everything else in our eating traditions, we have played with the natural order of things and unduly compromised our health. Without our knowing it, we have already skewered the processes nature intended things to be; in this case, “sum-od” as the natural way of regulating our eating. And all in the name of fleeting gratification – those short and small moments when flavors burst and dance in our tongues.*

For feedback, go to www.lifestylesbacolod.com, check Bacolod Lifestyles on Facebook or follow @bacolodtweets on Twitter

back to top