Flare

Flooding the press and social networks is a fierce rematch between one side of fish sauce and the other side also calling itself… fish sauce. As netizens humorously say, this is a battle between two brothers who have different fathers but different mothers!

In 2012, when the giant brand Starbucks made its first “capitalist step” into the Vietnamese beverage market, a coffee giant of the Central Highlands that was making waves at that time sarcastically said that “Starbucks sells a sugar water that smells like coffee”. It was thought that the world-famous coffee brand, but on the other side of the globe, would “go bust” right in our beloved S-shaped land. Honestly, some people were gloating when they thought that Starbucks deserved to receive a lesson from the civilized market when it dared to bring sugar water to “trick” the Vietnamese people. Thinking so, who would have thought that they would have to rub their eyes and witness long lines of people lining up in front of Starbucks to have their turn to enjoy that “sugar water that smells like coffee”. It turns out that Starbucks is not fooling, and the Vietnamese people are not easily fooled. After doing some research, I found out that before selling sugar water in Vietnam, Starbucks had 17,800 coffee shops in 49 countries. That’s right, in the market, customers are the measure, this world is not so easy to fool. That is the story of coffee, a drink that tastes bitter but also sweet in both literal and figurative sense, but the story of fish sauce is different. It can be fooled, it can be fooled and the most terrifying thing is… it can be fooled!

Loe is a short way of expressing lies, however it is not just a common lie but a more blatant, brazen, cunning and even mean way of deceit. There is no decent lie but loe is the most vile, fearful, hateful and contemptible of all lies. Only in very rare and isolated cases do people use the word loe to describe deception and lies and in the case of "industrial fish sauce", the author would like to borrow the word loe.

If it is not fish sauce but still calls itself fish sauce and seems to want to dominate fish sauce, then it is a lie. According to current Vietnamese standards, the product called fish sauce is the product obtained from the fermentation process of a mixture of fish and salt, in a covered barrel and in a normal time of 6 months. So everything that is not "obtained from the fermentation process of a mixture of fish and salt, in a covered barrel and in a normal time of 6 months" is not fish sauce. That's it, very clear.

I still remember in 1990 when I was a student in Hanoi, we ate together. At that time, there was a famine so the kitchen created a delicious rice sauce. The ladies used burnt roasted rice, put it in water and boiled it, added salt, MSG and of course a few spoons of real fish sauce to get the smell, then a few stalks of onion, then a few slices of real chili. This dish was left in a big pot for free in the middle of the kitchen, anyone who was short of food could just go there and scoop it up. We jokingly called it Phu Quoc fish sauce, the kitchen ladies gradually got used to calling it that. However, no one here was fooling anyone, we took the initiative to call it that to fool the tongue. It was roasted rice water, served for free. No one lied to anyone, happy, clear and most importantly, delicious. To the point that my roommate had to exclaim, "Maybe we should bottle it and take it to the market and say it's fish sauce to sell to buy rice." I thought it was a joke, a witty and ironic language unique to the subsidy period, but a few decades later it became a reality. Our “Phu Quoc fish sauce” boiled with roasted rice back then now sits proudly in every supermarket, proudly on every dining table and takes root in every corner. Only now it is not as crude and clumsy as it was in the past.

Back to the “fish sauce war”. Obviously, the liquid mixed with chemicals, flavorings and “enriched” with 1% fish sauce cannot be fish sauce. Calling it fish sauce is not an injustice to fish sauce, but an insult to fish sauce.

Why are netizens and the press so heated? Do people hate that bottled industrial seasoning? No! No one hates it, it's even quite eye-catching, convenient and delicious from a consumer perspective. People are jumping up and down because they see a black and white conflicting idea "fed" by the quality management agency through a draft document on standards! People are afraid that the policy will be manipulated, bent by the unorthodox interests that are rampant as they have been. People are afraid that traditional fish sauce - a unique culinary pinnacle, a product containing cultural elements and the results of thousands of years of distillation by our ancestors - will be blatantly and brutally appropriated. People imagine and predict a disaster of fish sauce extinction by the greed that lurks in the market.

People need fairness, people work for fairness. No one dares to chase and no one has the right to chase that salty bottled water out of the market. No one forbids them to use 1%, even 0.01% of fish sauce to "make goods". It is just that people suggest, to be exact, require all products that have entered the market to restrain their aggression and play fair. If "you" are delicious, good, beautiful, you can name yourself and the world will choose you and reject "us". Even at that time, who knows, I might have to bow down and take 1% of you to put into my product. Why don't you name yourself to make it legitimate instead of clinging to my birth name? To take over or to be ungrateful to me? You live as a parasite on my body and then you destroy me, what then? In short, I don't have the right to destroy you but you don't have that right with me. The game of the civilized market is not a game of snatchers.

With a huge vocabulary of Vietnamese, I think you are wise and sober enough to choose a name for yourself. It could be a dipping sauce, a nutritious salty water, a seasoning water, you can even arbitrarily declare something like "This product is not a medicine and does not have the effect of replacing medicine" whatever you want. I wonder, I am fierce because you and all the people above you have to cling to my name for what? To force me to death? The "Traditional fish sauce contaminated with arsenic" case last year caused many families to go bankrupt, surely you have not forgotten. That is morality. I do not insult you, nor do I oppose you, I even support you, I am willing to lend you my thousand-year-old sweetness to improve the quality. As long as you do not fool me, do not fool consumers and do not fool the management agency. I also hope that the management agency does not fool the people because of you. From an ethical perspective, it is not right to be deceitful, from a legal perspective, it is not allowed to be deceitful, and from a capacity perspective, it is not possible to be deceitful. Impersonating someone for so many years is “enough”, give me back my name and name yourself. It is not only civilized but also self-respect and honorable. Protecting your products is protecting yours, protecting tradition is protecting ours. And if after this incident, you still insist on calling yourself fish sauce, that is fine. But to make it easier for consumers to identify, I suggest that the management agency call us Traditional fish sauce and call you fish sauce… Deceptive.