IN THIS country, of course, one can be too thin, and you will know you have reached that point when people start asking you if you have lost your job or your lover, become a drug addict, or been stricken with tuberculosis. But while Filipinos like to have some meat on their bones, these have to be in the proper places and in the proper quantities. Otherwise, they may just wake up with a dish of achara (pickled vegetables) placed by their side and someone fanning them with a banana leaf. Or asked if they have won a seat in Congress, which for many is the bigger insult.

These days, it is the South Beach Diet that is the rage among the hefty (including those merely “feeling” fat), largely because it promises the dieter weight loss without skipping any meals. This is, after all, a society where life revolves around food. Those who don’t chew along with the others are sure to be the subject of whispered debates regarding the state of their private finances or their family background that has, because of the dieters’ abstinence, all of a sudden become dubious. (Aside from cuss words, a foreigner friend who worked here for years mastered just one vital phrase that made him feel he was a local: “Saan tayo kakain? — Where are we eating?”)

SBD has become so popular that many restaurants now offer menus supposedly following its specifications. One of the more moderately priced restaurants at ritzy Greenbelt 2, for instance, offers such a menu, at a price that is about 30 percent more than the daily minimum wage. It’s a very good deal by Greenbelt standards, even though the tomato capsicum soup fills just a third of a tiny bowl, the croutons are missing from the small plate of “light caesar’s salad,” and the baked chicken stuffed with spinach is a tad bit on the dry side. At another Greenbelt restaurant, a dish of tokwa’t baboy — fried tofu with pig cartilage — would cost more than half of that three-course meal, and chances are that unlike the salute to SBD, it wouldn’t leave you thinking you did your body good while making happy campers out of your taste buds at the same time.

That is, unless you pair the tokwa’t baboy with a steaming bowl of congee topped with chopped scallions and squirted with calamansi. The congee perfectly plays up the salty-sour taste of tokwa’t baboy and the experience will momentarily make you forget that you will have to peddle a minor body part to pay for it afterward (if you happened to dine in Greenbelt). But then if you’re in the first phase of the SBD, the congee would be out of the question because carbohydrates are supposed to be a no-no (which was also why the no-crouton caesar’s comes half-naked).

That’s probably the biggest drawback of SBD: carbos are banned for the first two weeks, and when they are allowed in again, they’re not in enough amounts to sop up any sauce on the plate. That would take much of the fun out of eating Filipino food like kare-kare, adobo, sinigang, and pinakbet, food that begs for the blandness of rice for their robust flavors to shine and satisfy without overpowering the palate. It is also rice that makes the salty tinapa and tuyo a feast for kings, especially when the fish are drenched with the acid freshness of raw tomatoes. The late food critic Doreen Fernandez was once even moved to write, “If we didn’t have rice, our deepest comfort food, we would probably feel less Filipino.” Which makes it probable that many Pinoys on SBD succumb to the call of the rice pot all too soon.

Rice is the one item that the starving poor struggle to retain valiantly on their table, come rain or high prices. When they say they are coping — “nakakaraos pa kami” — that means there is still rice on their plates even if there is little else besides. By comparison, among the upperclass, rice is the first to go once the calories start piling up. Yet it soon makes a hurried comeback on those orphaned porcelain plates because for a Pinoy, rich or poor, rice is the foundation of a proper meal. Even the richest Filipino cannot survive on putanesca alone; to keep him from jumping up from the dining table and murdering the cook, he must be served rice on a fairly regular basis, along with his favorite sinigang or nilaga, or even danggit or just bagoong.

In truth, there is no real divide among Filipinos when it comes to taste — just a few differences with regard to intensity among the regions perhaps. And even as millions of migrant workers toiling overseas bring in more flavors that widen the Filipino’s gustatory horizon — including that of the lower classes — the Pinoy gastronomic home remains founded on rice and layers of saltiness and sourness, with an occasional bitter bite here and spicy kick there. But peel those tasty layers to the minimum that can be tolerated by the Filipino and you have a balance of rice and just salt. This is why the harassed Filipino urbanite has been able to put up with eating mostly processed goods at home. It is also why we will probably end up very well preserved.