Did Nas Daily exaggerate and exoticize asin tibuok in new video?
Nas Daily recently featured asin tibuok in a video without naming it or the community that makes them | Screencaps from Nas Daily’s video
If there’s one thing the vlog Nas Daily does well, it’s reaching viral heights with its one-minute videos, which, to its credit, shed light on some underserved communities, their craft, and traditions.
Its latest subject is the asin tibuok of Alburquerque, Bohol. Except it didn’t even name it in the video uploaded Dec. 28, 2023, resorting to vagueries like “dinosaur eggs” and “coconut salt eggs.”
And while the artisans who laboriously make the salts—from collecting coconut husks to boiling seawater in handmade pots for hours—are shown on the video (also doing some questionable acts like licking the asin tibuok or pretending to swallow it whole) the community is not named either.
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Food heritage advocate John Sherwin Felix, popularly known as Lokalpedia, also pointed out that the video erroneously describes asin tibuok as tasting like coconut. It is, in fact, smokey owing to the process of burning the coconut husks that were made to absorb salt water for months before being turned into ashes where more salt water is filtered prior to cooking it in clay pots.
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He also took to Instagram to claim that Nas Daily used his photo of asin tibuok in the video cover without his permission.
The video now has over half a million views on YouTube, 1.5 million views on Instagram, and over 700,000 views on Facebook as of writing.
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Asin tibuok is considered one of the rarest salts in the world as the asinderos who make them are decreasing in number. While the video may have introduced the salt to the rest of the world, helping its cause to find more buyers, it has also inevitably brought with it some harmful stereotypes (“People eat dinosaur eggs like this and we found the people who make them in the Philippines” really?) and misleading information, if any at all.
