Forget the renewed babble of creating a “Republic of Mindanao” after the International Criminal Court rejected Digong’s appeal for interim release. Ignore the Department of Trade and Industry’s half-baked reasoning of why P500 is enough budget for a family’s Noche Buena. Our country’s issues are distracting us from one, indisputable truth. Invaders walk among us. Our kantos are being colonized by none other than the Malunggay Pandesal. Still hot.

Theirs is an unexpected return. It reminds me of an opinion article I read about the Japanese invasion in the Philippines. Before the war, Japanese spies had infiltrated the country as laborers. When war broke out, Filipinos could only stand in shock as their local street sweeper started wearing a military uniform and brandishing a bayoneted rifle.

Perhaps these blobs of bread—infused with dried malunggay leaves—are using the same strategy. They have pushed out the Selecta Ice Cream Cart, outwalked the Yakult Ladies, and are outrunning the motorcycle-riding taho vendor in sales. It won’t be long before people start accusing them of being police assets.

Pandesal: Food for all seasons

The pandesal is our common denominator. Its name comes from the Spanish pan de sal, which means “bread of salt.” Rolled first into long logs before being coated in breadcrumbs and cut into portions, the pandesal is considered to be the “poor man’s bread” because of its affordability and universal appeal. So widely eaten is the pandesal that its price has hovered within the P5 range for years. One can be broke and roam around the city and still buy a pandesal.

We usually buy them in the early morning hours when the first batches begin looking like little rising suns inside blackened ovens. A good pandesal is crunchy outside and fluffy inside. Bought as replacement for rice, pandesal is versatile—it can be eaten as-is, dipped in sweetened black coffee, generously coated with peanut butter or margarine. But it is imperative that the peanut butter must be from a jar that is unlabeled and with orange lid.  

Pandesal is also a tried-and-tested partner to bam-I or pancit guisado. One time, I tried slicing a big pandesal in half and stuffing it with a scoop of ube ice cream. It was a guilty pleasure and I haven’t looked back since.

The pandesal also comes with different flavors and fillings. In no particular order, my top three would be garlic butter, ube cheese (with a slab no bigger than the nail of my pinky) and, of course, the malunggay pandesal.

Love at first bite

I first tried malunggay pandesal in 2017. It was a Sunday, and my family had been staying at my father’s room in Davao for the weekend. This was in a staff house owned by the company he worked for. The company sold LPGs and fuel cylinders all over the country and the staff house, with free water and electricity, was for its employees. 

That Sunday, Papa woke up early and went out to the bakery across the highway, bringing back a paper bag bursting with pandesal. They were fist-sized, smelling slightly sweet and toasty. Freckled with black and green spots, Papa said they came from Budong, a bakery that only sold these types of bread.

And when he said their name, I thought it would taste like someone had taken a bunch of malunggay leaves, rubbed them on brown bread, and called it a day.

Crunchy and slightly charred

The first few moments were typical. Breadcrumbs made the crust grainy; the slightly charred sides made them crunchy. I almost burnt my tongue because the insides exploded with steam. After the first bite, I noticed that it was sweeter than regular salted breads. But of course, like snowflakes and fingerprints, no two bakeries produce pandesal with the same taste.

Then the swift kick of bitterness came in. The dried moringa powder—as Papa later explained what those specks were—brought an earthy and grassy taste. The pandesal was so dense I think I had eaten only three pieces before I got my fill. The sweetness of the bread made dipping it in hot Milo optional, though doing so transported me to another dimension. So when we got out of the staff house and found a long line on that Budong bakery, I understood. With those, one can power through the day with only fifteen to twenty pesos worth of pandesal.

M for malunggay superfood

Malunggay pandesal is what happens when a staple food gets repackaged for health-conscious consumers. The plant, available for free from a neighbor’s tree, is packed with vitamins and antioxidants. Its leaves are a mainstay in dishes such as tinolang manok and law-uy. The vegetable-infused bread is the answer to RA 8976, or the Philippine Food Fortification Act of 2000, the law crafted to address deficiencies of key nutrients in staple food ingredients such as rice, wheat flour, and salt. That is also why we have iodized salt. Or cooking oil and refined sugar infused with Vitamin A.

A consumer report conducted by PwC Philippines discovered that 67% of Filipinos prioritize nutritional value when purchasing food. Taste follows at 15%. Take the pandesal, which punctuates the everyday Filipino’s life, and infuse it with grounded plant powder, and one gets a superfood that may or may not save us from malnutrition. But malunggay is not unique. Researchers from DOST-FNRI are also looking at squash, kamote, and carrots as alternatives.

Our fixation on a one-size-fits-all meal is not new. Nor is the allure of the malunggay pandesal. If we trace its actual history, it was a key ingredient in the Nutribun program, one of the most divisive propaganda tools of the Marcos Sr. dictatorship that was resurrected in the 2022 presidential elections. A USAID initiative, the nutribun was concocted to combat malnutrition. However, the nutribun, aside from having been made a symbol of the Marcos Sr. golden years, was hijacked by “Project Tulungan”, stuffed inside boxes stamped with the words “Courtesy of Imelda Marcos.” And this practice is alive even today, where politicians plaster relief goods with their names and faces.

Social media memes 

Much credit must be given to memes in social media for the successful colonization of the malunggay pandesal. Not a day goes by in my life without encountering a meme on Facebook about the salted bread with green spots.

“Forget everything. Just don’t forget the malunggay pandesal.”

“For whom do you wake up in the morning? For malunggay pandesal!”

“You’re all caught up on corruption. You fail to notice that we are being invaded by malunggay pandesal.”

“I love you… No ‘I love you too?’ It’s okay, I understand. You wanted Gardenia bread but I’m just a Malunggay Express pandesal.”

Malunggay pandesal on wheels         

They also won the hearts and minds of the masses because of their new business model. Enter the “Hot Malunggay Pandesal on Wheels.” No longer is the bread of salt confined to the four corners of a neighborhood bakery. Today, the brown manna passes by homes, on a cart accompanied with catchy jingles which are a category of their own.

The most familiar jingle is the one I hear in Mintal every time I go to the market in the afternoon. It follows the standard format: announce the name, tell everyone it’s hot, then wrap it up with the voice of adult film star Lexi Lore saying “Sana All.” Some jingles end with “Papap Dol,” adapted from Budots remixes on the rhythmic honking of truck horns on the road.

Regardless, the business model is heaven-sent for small-time business owners, with lower operating costs allowing for more profit. The pandesal-on-wheels can even be franchised, just like Budong in its heyday.

Different times, different sizes 

In Robert H. Boyer’s book Sundays in Manila, Filipino sociologist Gelia Castillo said that the size of the pandesal changes according to how our economy is performing. If, say, gas prices are on a big-time rollback, people would see breads the size of their fists. But if prices are high, pandesals shrink to the size of chicken eggs.

They call it shrinkflation. The act of reducing size for the same price. It is most evident in fast-food restaurants, where prices surge for customer favorites while dropping in quality. A pandesal that stood at 35 grams is reduced to 25.

Even the flavor changes because of shrinkflation. Ingredients are swapped for cheaper versions—margarine for lard, less sugar, more rolls per dough. For big companies, these translate to millions of pesos in profits. For small-time owners, their business gets to see another day. There is less chance of layoffs and half-measures.  

But there is nothing illegal in the process. The Department of Trade and Industry even allows it, as long as manufacturers can justify the reduction. They usually do it to curb rising production costs and keep up with the competition.

But as they say, size matters. The bigger, the better for hungry customers. It irks me sometimes that it now only takes one bite to finish a malunggay pandesal.

There might come a day when I wake up in the morning without hearing the pandesal jingles outside my window. Perhaps because people just begin hearing the noise and forgetting the taste. Maybe people will begin looking at the Hot Malunggay Pandesal on Wheels as just vehicles we can ignore as we walk home. The memes will die. And when enough time has passed, YouTube videos and Reddit about them will begin appearing out of nostalgia.

But I’d like to think the green speckled pandesal will be bigger tomorrow. Big enough to be my first meal for the day. That it will have less air. That the cheese wouldn’t look like yellow snots between specks of green on brown bread. Just like how Budong used to make them. Just like the malunggay pandesal I first had that Sunday in 2017. Just like the pandesal that Papa woke early for to buy from the bakery just across the highway.

Clint Jovial Delima, 21, writes from Tagum City. He is currently studying at the University of the Philippines Mindanao and was a fellow at the 2025 Davao Writers Workshop and the 2025 Cagayan de Oro Young Writers Studio (CDOYWS).