Broth versus brand

Walk into any grocery store in the country, and you’ll find an entire Iloilo district’s identity distilled into a 55-gram packet of Lucky Me! La Paz Batchoy. It costs maybe PHP 20. It is largely salt, MSG, and dehydrated ambition. Yet it remains the dominant commercial owner of the name. Meanwhile, the actual traditional makers sweating over simmering bone broth in La Paz hold absolutely zero statutory protection.

A recent UP CIDS policy paper laid out this gaping legal vulnerability. We are looking at a quiet generational risk. Young consumers will soon naturally equate Iloilo’s signature slow-simmered, fiercely complex dish with a cheap foil packet. Iloilo City finally snagged a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy title. But let’s be brutally honest. A UNESCO badge means nothing without a legal trademark to stop “La Paz” from becoming an empty geographical signifier printed on millions of factory-line cups.

The sudden panic to fix this has its own dangers. Regulators recently dragged everyone into City Hall to aggressively codify what exactly belongs in the bowl. We need to tread carefully. UPV Chancellor Clement Camposano pointed out that batchoy is fundamentally a “democratic food.” It was born in the public markets of the toiling masses. Chinese immigrants influenced it, and locals built it from scraps and ingenuity. It is messy. It is subjective. It constantly evolves. Over-regulating the exact offal ratios or mandating the precise sweetness of the broth risks gentrifying a working-class staple. We cannot lock a living recipe in a bureaucratic box and effectively criminalize small-scale cooks who cannot afford elite certification.

Arguing over the exact percentage of guinamos feels insulting when you look at what these vendors survive day-to-day. Pursuing a prestigious Geographical Indication is useless if the businesses creating the authentic dish go bankrupt by tomorrow morning. Stakeholders are screaming about African Swine Fever crippling pork supplies. They face relentless power and water interruptions. Commercial rents can easily hit PHP 50,000 a month in prime spots. You can’t eat a UNESCO title. A geographical indication protects the name, but only aggressive economic interventions will protect the actual cooks standing over the pots. They need concrete support like a Common Service Facility or dedicated, subsidized vendor space at the Iloilo International Airport.

We do not have a decade to waste. It took ten grueling years to secure geographic protection for the Guimaras mango. And they had the benefit of measuring calcium in the soil. Batchoy is intangible heritage. Forcing fractured, competing local vendors into a unified formal association for an application will be a logistical nightmare. Instead of getting bogged down, Iloilo City needs to take the UP policy paper’s pragmatic shortcut. An LGU-led collective certification mark makes sense. Think of the Napa Valley model. The city steps in as the standard facilitator right now. This gives authentic makers an immediate legal shield against corporate imitators.

Let the lawyers fight over the ten-year intellectual property registrations in the background. Right now, the cooks just need cheaper pork, fair rent, and a fighting chance to prove that real broth takes time. You can’t just add hot water to history.