To lose our flavors

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

A foodie I recently met said she is aghast at how we treat our bountiful and fresh seafoods. They’re all so good, it takes so little for them to release their goodness, she said. Instead, what we do is treat them with synthetic flavor cubes or dust, like Knorr Cubes or Magic Sarap, that oftentimes do not enhance their true tastes and, in fact, sometimes destroy them.

This foodie had lived in Japan for years, where the cuisine is centered around freshness; she said she had learned to respect the true, natural flavor of food there, and has come back to  realize how much we are destroying them.

In the name of convenience, or maybe, by the simple brainwashing of the mass media, we have come to believe food tastes better with these flavoring condiment that we keep reaching for them without really thinking if we need them at all. After all, we have been cooking all these years without them, why did we allow them to insidiously get into our recipes and cooking?

Why, indeed?

The problem is, given the pervasive use of these artificial flavorings, we are teaching an entire generation that food must taste with them, and so we perpetuate their use. We do not even know how healthy their long term use is. Remember, they became popular only about 20, 30 years ago. Who could give us a long-term study, saying their everyday use do not have any impact on our health?

It is sad that we seem to have forgotten that nature has flavors, sufficient as God has created it, and we really do not need to bolster them with artificial means. All we need is to find the appointed time to pick them, the right way to prepare them, and the right way to eat them to fully and truly enjoy their goodness.

This is why fish still jumping in the net tastes inimitably good when grilled immediately, with little and even no salt at all. There is nothing like soup from livestock slaughtered just a few hours ago, or meat cooked before it is frozen. And one meat company had the temerity, a few years back, to convince us that frozen meat was cleaner – it launched an advertising campaign selling the idea that freezing kills the bacteria that boiling will not. Of course, it did not say this also killed more minerals and altered the taste of the meat itself. It also assumed that meat had to be kept for a long time before it is cooked.

It is appalling how, even our humble laswa has not been spared from the barrage of marketing messages telling us those magic cubes and dust work wonders on veggies. One such advertisement proclaims how children will want to eat gulay, or vegetables, cooked with these wonder substances.

Unless something earth-shaking happens, we shall soon find ourselves losing the authentic flavors of our cuisine to these multinational condiments. It is not too far into the future when the taste of laswa as we know it now, which is the combination of juices of vegetables spiked with maybe shrimp or krill, will be lost. Soon, the salty edge of Knorr or Maggi will define the laswa. There is no escaping that we are up against the multinational media resources.

Is that bad, you may ask. It will take a long time for the health question to be answered, but the cultural impact will be felt, if it is not being felt now.

You see, how our food tastes speak of our traditions, not just in the culinary sense, but even in the rest of our culture. These flavors help define us. Altering them can only mean we lose something of our soul.*

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