By: Telly Gonzaga-Ocampo
Tugnos ug Uban Pa
Goodness, varieties of fish have become so expensive. Amag–amag and mokat now reach 100 pesos per kilo. In my youth, no one even glanced at these two fish. Especially amag-amag. It was such an unappealing fish. But now, look how expensive it has become.
Since amag is pricey these days, it’s delicious as kilaw [raw fish salad]. Take off the bones and head. Soak it in vinegar with coconut cream and the usual spices. It has to be tuba vinegar. Mokat has become so scaly, but it’s tasty when stewed — only you must have the technique of peeling off the scaly skin before eating.
Tulingan [mackerel tuna], hasa-hasa, mangsi, swasid, tamarong — these were plentiful during our younger years. Fish were still sold threaded on sticks for five pesos, and ten pesos was already expensive. Fishermen just paddled leisurely with their oars. Only the wealthy had big boats with large nets.
Goodness, back in those days, 50 pesos was already a huge amount. Will those times ever return? They really won’t return. I recently bought a kilo of tugnos at 200 per kilo. I was hesitant to buy it. That kilo of tugnos could have grown into bigger bolinao. But it was already dead, so I just bought it.[anchovies]
Come to think of it, it seems all the miseries of our life today are caused by petroleum price hikes. On the other side of things, we have not looked into the conservation and preservation of our marine resources. Look at the bolinao. It’s good enough that the bolinao comes back. Is it because there are no more botanding [large predatory fish]? Seems like it. Tugnos gets caught because the nets now are made of screen material. Kujog can no longer be seen in the fishing grounds. They’re all wiped out. What danggit is left to be seen?
The sea moss is really gone. It used to be plentiful in my childhood years. We made them into unlan-unlan on the seashore at ebbtide. We pretended we were sunbathing in the seawater while the tide slowly ebbed, until the honasan was slowly surfacing, ready for our panginhas [gleaning for shells] and panilang sa swaki .
The scene in the honasan is gone. Children of this age no longer treasure the wonders the sea can offer. Their world is the internet and swimming is in the pool of resorts. They want to be seen and yet they clamour for privacy. This is our world now. The world of wastefulness and scarcity. There is a need for a paradigm shift: from scarcity to abundance.
