Flash

Currently dominating the press and social media is a fierce renewed battle between fish sauce and another brand also claiming to be... fish sauce. As netizens humorously put it, this is a battle between two twins with different fathers but different mothers!

In 2012, when the giant Starbucks brand took its first "capitalist step" into the Vietnamese beverage market, a coffee tycoon from the Central Highlands, who was then dominating the market, sarcastically remarked, "Starbucks sells sugar water with a coffee flavor." It was thought that this world-renowned coffee company from the other side of the globe would suffer a major setback right here in our beloved S-shaped land. Frankly, some gloated, believing Starbucks deserved a basic lesson in the civilized market for daring to "deceive" Vietnamese people with sugar water. But to their surprise, they were shocked to see long lines of people queuing outside Starbucks to try that "sugar water with a coffee flavor." It turned out Starbucks wasn't deceiving, and Vietnamese people weren't easily fooled either. It turns out that before "selling sugar water" in Vietnam, Starbucks already had 17,800 coffee shops in 49 countries. That's right, in the market, the customer is the measure; this world isn't that easy to fool. That's the story of coffee, a drink that's bitter but also sweet in both the literal and figurative sense. But the story of fish sauce is different. You can fool, and the most terrifying thing is... being fooled!

"Laughing" is a concise way of describing deception; however, it's not just ordinary lying, but a more blatant, brazen, cunning, and even petty way of outsmarting. There's no such thing as a decent lie, but "laughing" is the most vile, terrifying, hateful, and despicable of all lies. Only in exceptional and rare instances does one use the word "laughing" to describe deception and trickery, and in the case of the "industrial fish sauce," the author would like to borrow that word.

If something that isn't fish sauce claims to be fish sauce and seems to want to dominate it, then it's clearly just deception. According to current Vietnamese standards, a product called fish sauce is one obtained from the fermentation of a mixture of fish and salt in a covered container, typically for 6 months. Therefore, anything that isn't "obtained from the fermentation of a mixture of fish and salt in a covered container for typically 6 months" is not fish sauce. That's it, very clear.

I remember back in 1990, when I was a student in Hanoi, we ate communal meals. Back then, food was scarce, so the kitchen staff creatively invented a delicious sauce to pour over the rice. They used slightly burnt roasted rice, boiled it in water, seasoned it with salt and MSG, and of course, added a few spoonfuls of real fish sauce for flavor, along with some scallions and chili peppers to make it look authentic. A large pot of this sauce was kept free in the middle of the kitchen; anyone who needed food could just scoop some up. We jokingly called it "Phu Quoc fish sauce," and the kitchen staff gradually adopted the name. However, nobody was trying to trick anyone; we just called it that to tempt our taste buds. It was roasted rice water, served free of charge. No one was lying, it was all fun, straightforward, and most importantly, delicious. My roommate even exclaimed, "Maybe we should bottle it and sell it at the market, claiming it's fish sauce, to buy rice!" What we thought was a joke, a witty and sarcastic expression unique to the subsidy era, unexpectedly became a reality a few decades later. The "Phu Quoc fish sauce," made from roasted rice, that we used to make back then, now sits proudly in every supermarket, proudly on every dinner table, and has taken root in every nook and cranny. The only difference is that it's no longer as rustic and unsophisticated as it once was.

Returning to the "fish sauce war," it's clear that a liquid made with chemicals, flavorings, and a mere 1% fish sauce "enriched" in it cannot be fish sauce. Calling it fish sauce isn't unfair to fish sauce, but rather an insult to it.

Why are netizens and the press so agitated? Do people hate bottled industrial seasoning? No! No one hates it; in fact, it's quite appealing, convenient, and delicious from a consumer perspective. The outrage stems from the perception of a deliberate attempt to undermine the system, orchestrated by the very quality control agency through a draft regulation! People fear that policies will be manipulated and distorted by vested interests, as they have been before. They fear that traditional fish sauce – a unique culinary masterpiece, a product embodying cultural elements and the fruits of millennia of our ancestors' labor – will be brazenly and brutally appropriated. People envision and predict a catastrophic extinction of fish sauce, fueled by greed disguised as market forces.

People need fairness, they strive for fairness. No one dares to, and no one has the right to, expel that bottled salty liquid from the market. Nor is anyone forbidding them from using 1%, or even 0.01%, of fish sauce to "make their products." It's just that people are suggesting, or more accurately, demanding, that all products already on the market moderate their aggressiveness and play fair. If you're so good, so excellent, so beautiful, then name yourself, and the world will choose you and reject us. Who knows, maybe then I'll have to humbly take your 1% to add to my product. Why don't you give yourself a proper name instead of clinging to my birth name? To take over or to be ungrateful and disloyal to me? You're a parasite living off my body, and then you'll destroy me? In short, I don't have the right to destroy you, but you don't have that right either. A civilized market economy is not a game for opportunistic, short-sighted individuals.

With your vast Vietnamese vocabulary, I think you're wise and level-headed enough to choose a name for yourself. It could be "dipping sauce," "nutritious salt water," "seasoning sauce," or you could even arbitrarily declare something like, "This product is not medicine and does not replace medication"—whatever you want. I wonder, why am I so vehemently insisting on using my name? To kill me? You haven't forgotten last year's "traditional fish sauce contaminated with arsenic," which ruined so many families. That's ethics. I'm not insulting you, nor am I opposing you; in fact, I support you. I'm willing to lend you my thousand-year-old sweet flavor to improve the quality. Just don't deceive me, don't deceive consumers, and don't deceive the regulatory authorities. I also hope the regulatory authorities won't deceive the people because of you. From an ethical standpoint, deception is unacceptable; from a legal standpoint, it's not permissible; and from a competence standpoint, it's impossible to deceive. Impersonating someone for so many years is "enough," you know. Give me back my name and name yourself. It's not just about civility, but also about self-respect and honor. Protecting your product is protecting yours, and protecting tradition is protecting ours. Even if, after this incident, you still insist on calling yourselves "Traditional Fish Sauce," that's fine. But to make it easier for consumers to identify us, I suggest the regulatory agency call us "Traditional Fish Sauce" and you "Deceptive Fish Sauce."