Everything in a Philippine grocery store has sugar added to it. You can’t buy a can of corn doesn’t have sweetener on the list right after the corn. Want bacon? It’s all ‘honey glazed’, really sugar and artificial and natural flavorings. If you leave a dried mango slice out of the bag in this warm, humid climate, before long it is oozing melting sugar on whatever you were dumb enough to set it. Canned meats and vegetables have sugar added. Is no tinned food sacred? Everything from tomato sauce to hot dogs (a duo they serve together at the local McDonald’s; McPasta, anyone?) has some form of sweetener as or tucked in right behind the first one or two ingredients. High fructose corn syrup, brown rice syrup, glucose, sucrose, maltodextrin; whatever guise it wears, it all boils down to sugar.
Sugary foods in fact, monopolize about a third of every Philippine grocery store in which I’ve shopped. The above-mentioned dried mangoes take up an aisle. There’s at least one local cookie isle, filled with regionally made baked goods, the most popular of which is otap, a flaky pastry cookie dusted with, any guesses? Sugar. Also in this aisle are shortbreads and a variety of other gooey treats like the heavenly butter cookies covered in a chewy layer of sugared peanuts and flavored with lime. Sounds weird, tastes great. This baked goods isle is not to be confused with the regular packaged cookie aisle. You know how, in American grocery stores, the cookie aisle is also the chip aisle? Not so in the Philippines. The cookie aisle is jam-packed both sides with packaged cookies, with some crackers thrown in. There is a separate isle for chips.
Neither is the cookie aisle to be confused with the bakery stand just on the other side of the cash registers. Most grocery stores here have a food court at the entrance. There is always a bakery, serving, aside from decorated cakes, a selection of white breads, mostly pastries and buns stuffed with sweets like chocolate or peanut butter or heavenly coconut paste died, for reasons unknown, bright green. As long as I am eating bleached white flour and corn syrup, what’s a little food coloring amongst arteries?
Back inside the grocery store, there are two candy aisles, one for small servings like candy bars and bags of sweets, another for bulk candy. Not to be confused with the separate section of the store, the duty free type area that sells the booze and imported chocolates and candies.
Then there is the ice cream isle. It is actually a regimented maze of small isles made up of flip door or glass top waist high freezers chock full of all kinds of ice cream sold in big tubs. Nestle is in the ice cream market here and in many foreign countries, and they put out some outstanding flavors, like banana with graham cracker chocolate pieces and caramel swirls, and just plain old delicious mango. The ice cream islands are intermixed with the frozen meat section, so don’t be surprised if, in your ice cream frenzy, you crank open the lid of a chest freezer and are suddenly faced with a sea of unidentifiable chicken parts and cheese injected hot dogs loaded with, you guessed it, sugar.
