Talong at bagoong

By Marifi Jara

QUELIMANE, Mozambique—It’s not a case of LSS (last song syndrome), where the last song that you heard, usually not on purpose and merely picked up in passing or in the background somewhere, plays repeatedly in your head until you feel that you are going a bit crazy just trying to get rid of it. It is at its worst when the song is not one of your favorites (read: you actually think that song is cheezy) and attacks during bedtime.

Mine is a case of WTT (what’s that tune?!), where you become a bit obsessively mad trying to remember the title or sing the entire song of one stanza/one line that keeps playing in your head.

I’ve been going about the past couple of days in a slightly-deranged state with this going on-and-off in my mind: (Sing to the tune of “The Long and Winding Road”) Talong at bagoong, dum dum dum dum, ang ulam natin ngayon…

I am sure that was a Tito-Vic-and-Joey song but I can’t remember now where I heard it from in my childhood. Must be from watching Eat Bulaga, or Iskul Bukol, or perhaps TODAS. In any case, it hasn’t only been playing in my head, I have actually been singing it, and I find myself smiling. It is creatively funny, isn’t it?

This WTT attack was provoked by a letter sent to The PUNCH about the Bt eggplant that is now being developed in the country, with one of the field testing sites located in Pangasinan’s Sta. Maria town.

The issue involves the age-old debate over genetically-modified (GM) products with proponents on one side stressing the benefits and an opposing side sounding alarms over the dangers.

The Bt eggplant is basically one that has been spiked with Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), a protein that makes it resistant to the common worm (known as FSB for ‘fruit and shoot borer’) that infests the crop.

Eggplant farmers usually resort to chemical pesticide to address this problem which could, at worst, cost them as much as 90% damage in their harvest.

The field testings in Sta. Maria has reportedly yielded encouraging results with several successful harvests of eggplants free from the pesky worms.

But groups against the Bt eggplant claim that this GM variety poses risks to humans and so they want the field testings to halt.

The Bt eggplants are not commercially available yet, but they could be in the next year or two.

With that close a timeframe, the government and the proponents, as well as the opponents, must at this point embark on a wider information campaign so that farmers and the general public will be educated on the real deal about this Bt talong.

By all means continue with the field testings. That, after all, is the beauty of science.

But let there be complete transparency in these experiments so that people can decide for themselves whether to go organic, pesticide-sprayed, or GM, if the Bt eggplant does prove to be safe for human consumption.

What next, a GM bagoong? Who knows.

In the meantime, how to shake off this Talong at bagoong, dum dum dum dum…

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