Food has always been the most tangible indicator of the country's economic status. If the prices of rice, sugar, sardines, and cooking oil increase, the masses have no recourse but to tighten the belt or worse, "magdildil na lang ng asin."

You'll know it when the pandesal shrinks and cost an extra peso or remains cheap and large but unusually hollow inside.   You'll know it when your mother comes home with one small bag of groceries and it already cost her three hundred pesos or more. You'll know it when the neighbor's kitchen wafts the pungent but delicious smell of tuyo, at dinner time, five days in a row.

But there is nothing more symbolic than the galunggong to many of us who were of age in the years following 1986. Galunggong was former president Corazon Aquino's indicator of the country's economic suffering from the regime that preceded her term. If poor families could afford galunggong, then it means the economy's healthy, not screwed. And families will have enough money left to buy komiks or watch a Carlo J. Caparas ouvre (Kamagong was being shown in 1986, I couldn't help but check at imdb).

Cory's recent passing reminded me of that fish. Called mackerel scad (Decapterus macarellus) in English (thank you to Market Manila's post on the fish), galunggong is usually served fried or cooked as paksiw and strewn with siling haba and luya in our house. I loved poking the eyes out to eat. It was probably the first fish I learned how to gut when I was old enough to help in the kitchen. It had no scales so it was easy to clean.

Sadly, my mother no longer serves galunggong for dinner. Maybe she finds it too expensive or she prefers another kind of fish. I've asked her to buy it again this week, to see how much the price has since changed and just to remind ourselves of how life was like when galunggong, and Tita Cory, meant something more.

Image from www.flickr.com/photos/gracinhamarco.