Photos by Rhayan Gatbonton Melendres
Venice has always been one of my favorite cities in the world. In fact, it was the last city I visited before the pandemic. I stayed in Venice for a whole week just by myself exploring this mystical city—ok granted there were tourists but when you are in love with a place, you go myopic and it’s just you and the moment. I love Venice for its architecture, canals, pedestrian pathways, artisanal shops, galleries, museums, church, and palacio concerts. I love it for its food and its rich history.
Venice was a trading empire for 1,100 years. And it all began by its trade in salt. The lagoons were ideal for harvesting salt, which allowed them to invent an assembly line-type process of extracting salt by stages of evaporation. The success of their invention led to higher yield in salt production and then trade. Soon the Venetians were able to extend their stock to other trade goods as well as trading routes, eventually dominating the Adriatic and European markets and beyond. Venice, after all, became one end of the Silk Road, the first global trade route in history.
Manila, made up of a series of islets, was once called the Venice of the East. You won’t believe it now since our canals are clogged or dried up. Worse, through the centuries, they have been reclaimed in the city’s ever constant need to expand. Some areas of Manila could have been ideal for salt production. In fact, Malate was said to have been made up of salt beds and its name was widely believed to have been derived from the word maalat.
Saltmaking has been around since pre-colonial times. Early Spanish accounts recorded well entrenched trading patterns between lowland and highland communities as well as exchanges between and among islanders in the Visayas. Considered one of the more important commodities, especially for mountain-dwelling communities, salt was often traded. Its valued place in our ancient past and even today stays true to the phrase “Salt of the Earth.”
We are so dependent on salt that we now import about one million metric tons a year. But as news reports point out, at 36,289 kilometers, ours is the fifth country in the world with the longest accumulative coastline. We only need six percent of this to produce the salt we need to meet domestic demand. As the reports also predict, with the coconut planting season expected this year, another 300,000 metric tons is needed to be used as fertilizer, leaving the country with an impending salt shortage. At the moment the country imports 93 percent of its salt needs from Australia and China. The Department of Agriculture and some lawmakers have now called for measures to help resuscitate our dying local salt industry.
Granted we do have modern salt production capabilities, it is still not enough to meet domestic demand. It doesn’t help that local communities of saltmakers have disappeared or have dwindled to the brink of extinction because of cheap salt imports. A thriving local salt industry could have helped alleviate regional demands for salt.
The other day, I was having a conversation with University of the Philippines assistant professor and PhD candidate in Archaeology Rhayan Gatbonton Melendres about his ethnographic research on the pottery communities in Alburquerque, Bohol. We were talking about pots, specifically “lagaan ng asin,” used in the rare saltmaking process called Asin Tibuok or what has been marketed abroad as “Dinosaur Egg” salt.
To continue to leave the issue of shortages in rice, onions, and salt unaddressed will lead to even bigger problems for the government and the people.
Asin Tibuok is unique because of how salt is extracted from sea water. It involves an evaporation process using small earthenware pots in which to boil the brine. The process to produce the brine is different from other saltmaking processes in the region in that coconut husks, left in saltwater for up to six months, are used to soak up the salt from saltwater. The husks are taken out to dry and then burned in an open fire to make ash. After a few days, the ash is gathered and poured into a dried buri palm leaf-lined vat with funnel and seawater is poured over it. The dried buri palm leaves serve as a filter to separate the salt from the ash. The filtered brine is then placed in small “lagaan ng asin” earthenware pots, then boiled. The pots are constantly filled with brine until salt forms and fills the pots, which are left to cool and then broken, leaving the salt to retain the form of the pot. This is why Asin Tibuok has come to be known as “Dinosaur Egg.”
There’s a close relationship between saltmaking and the production of the “lagaan ng asin” pots. As Melendres points out, when you see a decline in saltmaking, you also see a decline in the production of the pots. Records show that close to a hundred years ago, single orders for such pots would reach in the hundreds, while in recent times barely a hundred pots are required per order. Melendres adds, just before the pandemic, there was just one salt maker, as well as one “lagaan ng asin” potter, left in Alburquerque.
The pots aren’t the only commodity suffering from the salt shortage. “The price of dried fish has also risen,” says Senator Imee R. Marcos. “We have taken salt for granted despite its uses not only in cooking but also in health and agriculture. Salt is used in manufacturing medicines, food preservatives, animal feed, and fertilizer.”
Indeed, issues in the agricultural sector may seem trivial as we talk merely of cereal, vegetables, and seasonings but as the senator’s father, the late President Ferdinand E. Marcos (FM), pointed out, “To look at one aspect exclusively and ignore the rest is bound to lead to errors of analysis and judgment.” To continue to leave the issue of shortages in rice, onions, and salt unaddressed will lead to even bigger problems for the government and the people.
Sen. Imee and her late father had a very strong bond. He considered her his “intellectual equal,” lovingly calling her, “my darling genius of a girl.” Her mom (Imelda) would think both she and her dad were crazy, Imee recalls, while they laughed over jokes only they understood.
One day during my “recovery” operations (I was tasked to recover personal effects and memorabilia of the senator’s parents) at their old home in San Juan, Imee entered carrying a tree sapling on each hand, just two samples from the from the 20 saplings or so she bought to plant around the house just like her father did when he first purchased the house as a bachelor. You see, most of the trees FM planted in San Juan were chopped down when the house went through a complete overhaul and expansion. The late president planted fruit-bearing and medicinal trees all around the property. When Imee was little, she and her father would sit quietly in the garden amid the trees and listen to the cicadas sing at night. Even today, every time she sees a Kakawate tree, she is reminded of those precious moments spent alone with her dad.
Special thanks to Andrea Yankawski for her very informative 2019 paper on saltmaking and pottery production community craft specialization in Alburquerque, Bohol.
Images of Asin Tibuok from Rhayan Gatbonton Melendres; vintage photos of Senator Imee Marcos courtesy of the (Marcos Presidential Center).