We skipped breakfast because we had a really big dinner at Auntie Ann’s house last night, our hostess. We had tiger prawns and pork adobo. We ate to our heart’s content!

The next day, the team and I decided to hit the local public market early because we wanted to see how the local salt was utilized. There, we found Manang Patricia, a 63-year-old Alaminos longganisa maker. She started working at her family’s meat stall at the age of 16; that’s 47 years of selling longganisa.

In the market, many vendors claimed their sausage as the best. But before we met Manang Patricia, we were referred to one vendor, it turned out that she’s a local celebrity known for her sausages. As she recited her accolades, name-dropping Manila celebrities she’d been with and TV shows she was featured in, my interest searched for an escape. At the corner of my eye, several feet at the end of the stall, there was a group of men manually encasing longganisa, as if they were racing. It piqued my curiosity so I politely said goodbye to the longganisa starlet and went over to the group of working men. That’s how we learned that Manang Patricia owned the operation and that she is the largest longganisa producer in that market. It turned out that the quieter and demure sausage vendor supplies the entirety of Pangasinan, National Capital Region (NCR – Metropolitan Manila) and other areas. Apart from the longganisa, her stall offers other cured meats. She said that due the pandemic, what we saw today was just a fraction of her original labor force. She felt a responsibility to employ her key people and they too depended on her for their survival. To know more about Manang Patricia’s family-run operation, check her daughter’s vlog on YouTube: https://youtu.be/IX3gdZFCBlA.

After the market, we went back to the salt farms to film the harvest. We met up with Arnold, son in charge of the main salt farm owner of the area. Although the gray skies and the wind howling, the day was relatively warm as we were religiously supplied with iced water by Arnold’s staff. The water seemed to have tasted like syrup just from being surrounded with endless salt for a couple days now.

Salt harvest is a sight to behold. It’s not easy, but the farmers make it look so effortless. It makes one wonder how much we take salt for granted — seeing first-hand the back breaking work involved, in exchange for a daily wage of $5 or less (the latter, in most cases).