With increased poverty and hunger, people in the Philippines are bound to eat leftovers or trash food. Most of the people take trashy food from McDonald’s and Jollibee’s and sell them to feed 600k people.
The Philippines is a small country in Asia famous for its exotic beaches, expansive forests, and abundance of volcanoes. But other than scenic beauty, this country has another face as well. Around 600,000 people are suffering from food shortages in the country. Lack of resources and job opportunities are making people eat food from the trash. A few groups collects leftovers from McDonald’s or Jollibee’s and made food from them.
‘Pag Pag’ is a term, Filipinos used for leftovers. In the heart of Manila, the capital city there is a small eatery run by a lady name, Evelyn. She runs a restaurant name ‘Evelyn’s Pag Pag’ where she cooks leftover food and sells it for 30 Pesos per dish. She is earning 1000 pesos a day which keeps her going.
Just like Evelyn, there are four to five similar groups that collect trash from different places. process the bones and meat, and create new dishes to feed people. These dishes are not healthy but they are feeding a family at least.
With more than 600,000 people living in Manila’s slum district of Tondo, the worst of the conditions can be found at Tondo’s ‘Happy land’. Where the population has grown from around 3,500 in 2006 to more than 12,000 today. This area is called happy land because you always find people smiling and resilient despite poverty and hunger.
The dumps from where this food is picked up are often seen filled with rodents, rats. So, health risks include ingestion of poisons, toxins, and food-borne illnesses. The National Anti-Poverty Commission has warned time and again against eating pagpag because of the threat of malnutrition and diseases such as Hepatitis A, typhoid, diarrhoea, and cholera.
However, a pagpag vendor claims that no one has ever died from eating pagpag food.
The Process
They work day and night, roam on the streets collecting left over food from dumps and garbage.
Then they wash and remove all the dirt from the meat, wash it, remove bones and other unwanted elements, pack it in a plastic bag, and sell it to their potential clients.
A cook in a restaurant in Tondo, Manila prepares pag pag in traditional Filipino cooking, such as pagpag la kaldereta or adobo, with the mixture of the leftover chicken from Jollibee and KFC as the main ingredient. Other famous pag pag dishes are mechando and re-fried chicken.
As more poor communities are going towards pag pag, its an alarming situation for the government.
