by Cecile C.A. Balgos

“TELL ME what you eat,” French food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said almost two centuries ago, “and I shall tell you what you are.” In modern-day Philippines, those words still ring true, with the contents of a dining table revealing much about the diner, including the size of his wallet. Where one usually eats is a good indication of one’s status in life, especially in the cities like Metro Manila, where the dining divide is vast and prices and restaurant protocol discourage a commingling of paupers and princes. Of course, from time to time, the princes cross over and eat at Jollibee. Money, after all, gives one the privilege of having choices, which increase in proportion to the amount one can and is willing to spend. But it’s no guarantee of a discerning palate or good judgment, which is why restaurants with mediocre food and atrocious prices continue to exist and why well-heeled parents fill half their grocery carts with instant noodles for their kids. It’s bad enough that there are really thousands of families who cannot afford anything else but instant noodles to stave off pangs of hunger. But scores more who should know better and can take their pick from the supermarket shelves are actually opting to fill their bellies with instant pancit with frightening regularity, from breakfast to midnight snacks.

Today’s fast-paced lifestyle has proved to be a great societal leveler. Convenience has become the key consideration in putting together a family’s daily menu, both for the moneyed and the masses, especially now that two-income families have become common, even as reliable househelp has become as rare as erudite senators. That’s largely why instant noodles are such a hit in this country, as are canned goods like corned beef, meat loaf (read: Spam and Maling), tuna, and sardines. One could even say these have become the new Pinoy staples, never mind if they seem more appropriate as emergency rations. They’re relatively cheap (well, excluding Spam), quick to prepare, and — admit it — quite tasty.

There’s the hook: more often than not, these quick foods are loaded with sodium in a variety of forms, pleasing the Filipino palate, which is a slave to salt, among other things. Sodium serves to preserve the food in some instances and to enhance the taste in all.

Enhancing may be an understatement, though. The label of a popular brand of pancit canton, for instance, says that each 65-gram serving (or the whole packet) has about 1,760 mg of sodium or 73 percent of the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of 2,000 mg a day. Unlike the mami variety, which is often shared by many members in a lower-class household, a packet of instant canton is consumed usually by just one person. Ravenous teeners and office workers have been known to consume two packets each in one sitting, sometimes at breakfast, which means they start their day already packed with almost twice the amount of sodium their bodies should have for the next 24 hours. But like most Pinoys who get restless if their jaws aren’t working (talking as well as eating), they will still be plowing through snacks, lunch, more snacks, and then dinner. More salt will be present in those foods, which could be accompanied by condiments such as patis or soy sauce. A tablespoon of patis or fish sauce has 1,394 mg of sodium while an equivalent amount of soy sauce has 1,423 mg. By the time they go to bed, our canton-eaters will

Photo by Jojo Pasana

have a lot in common with Lot’s wife after she turned around and had a last look at Sodom and Gomorrah. No wonder hypertension is among the top five causes of morbidity among Filipinos.

IT’S SAID that the Filipinos’ love affair with salty food is the natural result of being surrounded by seawater, as well as the need to preserve food, usually fish, in preparation for lean months. The way we are loading up on sodium these days, we may just as well be turning into daing ourselves. But this may be more true among the lower classes, who, much as they would want to, are unable to buy fresh produce most of the time and so settle instead for the sodium mini-bombs masquerading as packaged food. In comparison, many among the better-off still have lucid moments during which they spend some of their market money on delectables that do not come out of a can or plastic or foil packets.

In bygone days, it was the poor folk who feasted on fresh foods while the landed gentry took pride in their hoards of preserved food. According to Gilda Cordero-Fernando, author and keen observer of Philippine culture, preserved food indicated surplus or an abundance of goods, proof of a landlord’s wealth. This was before the advent of processed food, which actually began a U.S. solution to its problem of how to keep its soldiers fed even when they were spending days deep in the trenches. Preserved food for the Filipino rich then meant pork cooked adobo style, which was stored in clay jars, as well as an assortment of sausages and cured meats. At the same time, the landlords had the pick of everything — from the fattest hens to the whitest and finest sugar, to drinking water fetched from the clearest springs. Their daily meals were the comida fiesta of the kasama, who got the egg whites while the amos used the yolks for flan, had muscovado instead of refined sugar, and had no fancy pastries or pastillas for dessert, just fruit. Meat to the kasama was a luxury. Everyday fare consisted of rice, the catch of the day from the sea or a nearby stream or rice paddy, and vegetables.

Guess who came out more fit? As Cordero-Fernando writes rather gleefully, “The peasants grew strong and healthy from eating all that nutritious, second-class food. The landlords, on the other hand, suffered from overweight, high blood pressure, diabetes, bursitis, and gout — all the afflictions of people who have too much in life and dine too heartily and too well.” And, it must be added, from leading a too leisurely life as well. The landlords obviously didn’t even have to break a sweat preparing their favorite food; somebody else made sure the chickens grew plump and then ran after them with the cleaver and plucked them clean of feathers to meet the masters’ demand for pollo afritada. (And remember that scene in Oro, Plata, Mata, where the help peeled the salted watermelon seeds one by one for the señoritas who thought nothing of eating these by the handful at a time?)

Today, however, neither rich nor poor can boast to be healthier than the other, especially with rapid urbanization and its evil twin, environmental degradation (although some may say both are as cursed), wreaking as much havoc on our lives as clueless politicians and confused policy makers, and having a profound impact on what we all eat and how often. Another version of the dining divide, though, has managed to emerge: while more Filipinos are surviving on just one meal a day, those who are able to indulge themselves have been turning frantically to diets to get rid of the evidence of food devoured in huge quantities amassing around their middle.

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

Photo courtesy of The Manila Times

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.

http://pcij.org/i-report/1/tastes3.html

by Vinia M. Datinguinoo

LIKE MANY others in her generation, 11-year-old Clara Buenconsejo was bigger than her mother was at that age. In fact, she could no longer wear the clothes sold at the children’s section in department stores and her mother Malou had to scour shops selling surplus goods from the United States to find something that would fit her. But Clara’s size left Malou worried, not proud. The girl weighed 143 pounds, and by the time Malou brought her to a pediatric endocrinologist, Clara sported dark circles under her eyes and similar dark pigmentation on her nape, which the doctor would later point out as markers that a child is overweight.

Clara was diagnosed with borderline diabetes and put on medication for over a year to normalize her insulin level. A nutritionist also began seeing her for a weight management program, the first prescription of which was to remove all processed food from Clara’s diet — hotdogs, canned food, canned juices. After about four weeks Clara lost eight pounds. For three months she would visit the nutritionist once a week, discuss her food diary, be shown educational videos, and counseled about eating and living right. Malou would also be assisted in planning the family menu.

Two years later, Clara is now off that professional supervision. Both she and her mother are confident she no longer needs professional help to do those exercises and eat those veggies.

BIG PROBLEM. More adults are growing overweight, with the increasing trend being more pronounced among women. [photos by Vinia M. Datinguinoo]

Unfortunately, Clara’s story is becoming more common, and often, the tales of other overweight children do not have a similarly happy ending. Though still small in absolute numbers, the proportion of overweight children in the country has increased threefold between only 1998 and 2003, say experts. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls this increasing incidence an “epidemic,” which along with undernutrition in far bigger segments of the population make for a double burden that a country as poor as the Philippines is ill-equipped to handle.

More adults are also growing overweight, with the increasing trend being more pronounced among women. Government surveys show that the proportion of overweight adult women had increased from just over 39 percent in 1998 to 54.5 percent in 2003.

Doctors say that the danger in becoming overweight is that once it begins, it gets even more difficult to lose the excess weight, leading to what doctors call “overfatness.” The diseases associated with overfatness are so many that in itself, obesity is referred to as a disease. In turn, obesity is associated with health risks that run from head to toe, including stroke, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.

It’s not hard to see why this phenomenon is taking place in the Philippines today, even as hundreds of thousands of families across the nation scrounge for food. Simply put, larger segments of the urban population now have diets where taste and convenience are considered primary, and health and nutrition only a luxury. Too often, they consume large amounts of processed food that are poor in nutrients and dense in energy. This makes them eat a lot without feeling full, which soon gets them hungry again and looking for more food.

Clara herself recounts how, up until three years ago, her family dined mostly on canned and processed food like hotdogs, corned beef, and tuna. “Para kaming refugee,” she recalls. Her mother admits,”“I was rather lazy to cook then.”

Clara could put away quite a few of those hotdogs, but her processed-food diet was not the only reason she was ballooning. Never very active as a child, she was rarely out playing in the streets. Instead, she was almost always indoors, either drawing or taking on her grandfather in a round of chess. By the time she was 11, Clara carried some 30 pounds more than what was ideal for her age and height.

HEALTH AND nutrition experts agree about the ingredients that make up what they call an “obesogenic environment,” one that makes people grow fat, fast: high-fat, high-salt, and high-sugar diets and lifestyles that involve little physical activity. There are also medical conditions that can lead to obesity such as those associated with having hormonal glands that do not function properly. Genetics could play a part as well — some people are predisposed to getting fat because of family lineage. But minding the balance of food that one takes in and energy that is taken out tempers such predisposition and allows the individual to escape growing overweight.

WHO estimates that more than one billion adults worldwide are overweight; of these, at least 300 million are obese. In countries such as the United States, the problem has grown so huge that one in every four children is, or is at risk of becoming, overweight or obese. Meanwhile, Asia in the past 20 years has become a focal point of international concern with rates of increasing incidence rivaling those observed in the First World half a century ago. In countries as diverse as India, New Zealand, China, and Vietnam, the WHO is noting a “disturbing” increase in the prevalence of overweight especially among children.

Clara (right) was only 11 when she was diagnosed with borderline diabetes. Today she exercises regularly with her mother Malou (left) and follows a low-fat, low-sugar diet.

Here in the Philippines, pediatricians like Dr Sioksoan Chan-Cua have long been concerned about the increase in the number of obese children. Chan-Cua, who deals with illnesses related to growth and metabolism, says this is no recent trend, having noticed a growing number of obese children as early as a decade ago. Today she says, “In just one of my clinics, one whole drawer (of medical files) is for obese patients.”

Chan-Cua says many of these children are textbook cases of obesity: consuming a lot of fried and energy-dense food and drinks such as colas, and not having enough physical activity. One patient, she says, gained nine pounds in two months by spending the entire summer vacation watching TV and eating French fries. Another child drank his way to obesity by downing a liter of soda per day and doing little else other than eat, sleep, and go to school. Says Chan-Cua: “Children just don’t jump around as much as children used to.”

What is even more difficult, she says, is that most people carry the notion that plumpness in a child is good because it is “cute,” and it is a sign that the parents are not being remiss in their duty. “What these parents do not know,”says Chan-Cua, “is that it’s like a time bomb in the body.” And diffusing the time bomb becomes more difficult through time. In a recent report on diet and nutrition and their associated risks of chronic diseases, the WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warn about how overweight in childhood persists into adolescence and adulthood. “Overweight and obesity,” says the report, “are notoriously difficult to correct after becoming established.”

Yet even while they are young, overweight and obese children already face numerous health risks. “Children are aging prematurely,” laments nutritionist-dietician Virgith Buena, who says many of her young patients are developing illnesses that the medical community used to see only among much older people. Among her patients are two hypertensive boys; one of them is 11 years old while the other is only four — but already weighing more than 100 pounds. There is a 17-year-old boy who has just had a stroke. “Ang tindi (It’s all too much)!” says Buena, who, even as she sees one case after another, still cannot hide her grief.

A PARTICULAR concern is the increasing number of young children developing diabetes, of the type that — again — used to be seen only among adults. Diabetes is a life-threatening condition where the production of insulin by the pancreas is either deficient or ineffective, resulting in increased concentrations of glucose in the blood, which in turn damages many of the body’s systems, in particular the blood vessels and nerves. Diabetes accounts for some 3.2 million deaths worldwide every year. Two-thirds of all diabetes cases are directly caused by obesity. Dr Gauden Galea, WHO’s adviser on chronic diseases for Asia-Pacific, says, “The link is so intimate and is even stronger than the link between smoking and lung cancer.”

This increase in “diabesity,” is something Chan-Cua knows only too well. She says she has many adolescent patients who are obese and who have diabetes. “They’re around 12, 13, they do not even know that they have diabetes because they can get by,” she says. That is, until a simple wound festers and their parents start to worry and take them to seek medical help.

But seeing the doctor is only the first step in treating chronic diseases such as diabetes. At the minimum, says Chan-Cua, diabetic patients would need lifestyle changes including shifting to a healthy diet and keeping it and doing more regular

Fast-food restaurants offer cheap, tasty and convenient — but also unhealthy — meals.

physical exercise. Others might need to undergo medication upon diagnosis, and for some, for longer periods of time.

Chan-Cua says, though, that some patients eventually stop coming way before their treatment is completed because, she says, “they are limited by lack of time and money.” These are middle-income families she is speaking about. Given that access to medical attention is severely limited by financial resources, the problem may actually even be bigger than many of us are willing to believe.

By most accounts, the majority of those who consult specialists belong to the middle- and upper-income families. A poor family earning the minimum wage would be hard pressed coming up with the money for even just the weekly consultations. For those who would have to undergo a supervised weight management program, for instance, a minimum dozen weekly sessions with a professional nutritionist costs over P10,000. The total goes even higher once one adds the cost of medication.

But WHO warns that overweight and obesity may already be seeping into poorer families. “This is all hypothesis at this stage,” says Galea,”“but overweight is probably going deeper into the population where people do not have the funds to be able to buy foods that are healthier.” Thus, there have been accounts of what has been called “the bloating of the poor” in Asia, as ever-falling incomes lead poor families to buy more of mass-produced foods that are cheap and filling but very nutrient-poor, and less of low-energy dense foods such as fruits, vegetables and whole grain cereals that are more expensive. A recent study in the International Journal of Obesity also found that in developing countries, the burden of obesity shifts from the relatively well-off to the poor as per-capita income rises.

DESPITE THE numerous data from both government and the health industry, these have not been enough for anyone to map the prevalence of overweight and obesity in the country and, in turn, the associated health risks. The Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI), for one, regularly churns out nutrition surveys that are regarded as a “beacon” by international experts such as WHO’s Galea, who says these “give us a valid and scientifically credible figure behind policy.” But for Dr Cecilia Florencio, nutrition scholar and University of the Philippines professor, too much remains unknown. “Which Filipinos are we talking about?” she asks, referring to figures pointing to increasing overweight. “We haven’t even mapped out where overweight is, where there is more of, less of, where it is rising faster, not rising so fast and so on.”

Knowing these characteristics, Florencio says, will allow the formulation of the appropriate response. Right now, the official response has been to trumpet the need for a healthy lifestyle, the main components of which are to stop smoking, do regular exercise, and have a healthy diet. From this perspective, the point of having a healthy diet is to consume enough of the nutrients needed by the body to function properly, including drinking a lot of water and eating more fruits and vegetables.

But Florencio warns that it would be naive to think that teaching nutritive values would make the problem of poor eating habits go away. After all, she says, food is not just about nutrients: “Food is a source of contentment, of pride, success, of regularity of one’s life.”

Dr. Catherine Castañeda agrees, noting that what makes people decide if they will eat a particular food is mainly whether it’s tasty and affordable. A nutrition anthropologist, she says, “We don’t go to the market to get food because it’s high in, say vitamin A.”

“People won’t even look at nutritive labels unless they’re at the age where they might get these lifestyle diseases then they start to look,” she says. Which, she adds, makes it even more important to start educating children at a young age.

Today’s Filipino children, however, are learning a rather different lesson, courtesy of aggressive marketing by the fast-food industry: that fast food is modern and hip. It’s a message that parents have heeded as well, although they also appreciate that fast food products are affordable, tasty, and convenient. Many parents thus often reward a child for having high grades with a trip to Jollibee. Florencio remarks,’“But how many would say, ‘pag mahusay ka igagawa kita ng suman (if you do well, I’m going to make you a sticky-rice roll)’?”

Fast-food goodies, however, are not always the prime suspects in the blimping of populations. WHO’s Galea cites the case of Vietnam, where traditional local cuisine still reigns. He says local dishes such as the popular chicken noodles served on the streets now contain more cholesterol: “It has more fat in it therefore more tasty, but also more dangerous.” In addition, more and more Vietnamese are now getting less exercise after abandoning their bicycles in favor of motorcycles. As a result, Vietnam is seeing increased obesity and its associated diseases such as diabetes, the rates of which have doubled between 1993 and 2003. 

The Philippine food landscape, though, is clearly influenced by the fast-food industry. Dr. Chan-Cua’s own daughter also fell under the spell of Jollibee, chasing after the toys the local fast-food chain offered. But the doctor put her foot down and made sure her child would not get used to eating too much fast food. She also made her daughter eat vegetables,’“even just one piece,” the habit of which her daughter has grown into.

Experts say parents need to remain firm and teach their children to appreciate “proper” food. Still, getting a child to eat less junk and more nutritious food can be tricky. Jay Vincent Guevarra’s parents, for example, have just about given up trying to make him eat the family’s home-cooked meals. Instead, his father Jun brings home either Chickenjoy from Jollibee or spaghetti from McDonald’s for him almost every day. The 12-year-old says he likes these because they are’“delicious.”

TO WHO’s Galea, the food industry needs to take some responsibility, too. He says the industry needs to consider the impact of its food products on the health of consumers in deciding what they should offer. To help push the food industry in that direction, WHO in 2003 began a program with the Department of Health that would give recognition to exemplary food providers.

These food providers have to meet certain criteria in the health scale, including not allowing smoking, using healthier culinary methods, and providing healthy choices in the menu. Pasig City was the first city to participate in the program and attracted applications for recognition from 40 food establishments. Of these, two were recognized. Mandaluyong and Makati are next to be covered by the program.

For such a program to be relevant and make sense, however, consumers need to be armed with the right information about the nutritive values of the different kinds of food they are being offered. Many would also have to be reintroduced to the concept of exercise.

“The point is to balance,” says Buena. If you have to have those French fries, for instance, go easy on the salt, drink more water, and walk up the stairs instead of taking the lift. Regular physical activity — not just small chunks of time inserted in one’s routine whenever it is convenient — thus becomes currency for food.

The new generation of Filipinos is growing up fatter but not healthier.

Clara, now a trim 13-year-old, has become used to such trade-offs. If she wants a second helping of something — say, a brownie — her mother Malou would have her do the treadmill for more than the usual half-hour. Says Malou: “There’s a price tag in terms of exercise.”

It hasn’t been easy, says Clara, especially when it came to eating vegetables and doing the treadmill. “But I had my mom,” she says. Indeed, the mother who used to rely on canned goods has changed her ways as well and now supervises all the meals prepared at home and makes sure Clara has vegetables in her lunchbox. The 42-year-old magazine editor even experiments with vegetable dishes, hoping to stumble on something that would tickle her daughter’s palate. The results from her kitchen adventures aren’t always hits, but Malou has become a master of bargaining with Clara about doing extra rounds of jump rope in exchange for a second helping of desserts or other food that she really likes.

But since the physical exercise isn’t supposed to be punishment, Malou strives to make her daughter’s regimen fun. Because the treadmill bores Clara, there is the jump rope and aerobics at home. As often as they can, mother and daughter also head for the U.P. Diliman on Saturdays, doing three rounds of walking around the academic oval or playing soccer at the Sunken Garden.

On a recent Saturday morning, they make it to U.P., where Clara tries frisbee for the first time. She likes it, but says soccer still rules. Then she and Malou do their usual three rounds of walking, although the last round is interrupted by the ringing of a sorbetero’s bell. Clara has done well,

and for that, her mother tells the ice-cream man to give her a scoop on an unsweetened cone.

http://pcij.org/i-report/1/obesity.html

by Avigail Olarte and Yvonne T. Chua

Clara, now 13, was forced to undergo a makeover for health reasons. Before and after photos show the results.

GEMMA CANDELARIA is a mother of 10 who relies solely on her husband's earnings as a company driver for the family's expenses. But just like other wives with shoestring budgets, Candelaria has become an expert on stretching every peso, especially on days when she has only P100 for food. And so since last year, food in the Candelaria household has come in mini-size: 100-gram cans, 20-gram boxes, or 9-ml sachets.

"It's better this way," says the 36-year-old housewife. "It's cheaper and it saves us money. If you haven't much money, you pick whatever is cheaper."

For Candelaria and millions of other Filipinos, size does matter these days — the smaller, the better, because then they can afford to buy it. With the disposable income of Filipinos shrinking almost daily, many families now find buying in large quantities simply out of the question, and consumer-goods manufacturers seem to have introduced micro-marketing, also known as the make-it-small-and-snappy selling tactic, just in the nick of time.

Actually, this package-downsizing trend began in the 1990s with nonfood items. But it was only in the last three years that processed food started to be sold in ever-smaller quantities. Explains Jonathan Chua, unit manager of the multinational Procter & Gamble: "Downsizing is in response to consumer coping behavior. With harder times, income is flat and the cost of goods is rising. The budget remains the same, say P1,000. So families try to buy the same items, but in smaller quantities."

Micro-marketing has also left cash-strapped consumers feeling less oppressed. Chito Macapagal, general manager for corporate development of Unilever Philippines, says, "We have such low salaries. You feel deprived if you can't buy things that you really need. (Micro-marketing) is a way of (satisfying) that need."

Even if it means just having a taste of what you want. Vicky Abad of Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS), a global market information group, says, "If you wanna try ice cream and you can't afford (a big one), a pint would allow you that experience for something less."

At the same time, mini-sizing has meant big business for manufacturers who are now able to tap a segment of consumers they had previously been unable to reach when they were selling items in larger portions. Abad says manufacturers cannot ignore the sizable number of the population that belongs to the D and E socioeconomic classes, which account for 80 percent of the population. Obviously, manufacturers are going to lose out in the end if they cater only to the perfumed classes.

Nearly 90 percent of Filipinos, most of them from the D and E classes, now buy products in sachets and mini-sizes, according to the Global Omnibus Survey of Synovate, a marketing research firm. But even many among those who belong to the A, B, and C classes have turned to mini-sizes. Coffee, creamer, juice, chocolate and milk powder, soy sauce, and vinegar topped the list of the 30 percent in those segments who said they bought food items in smaller sizes.

Top 10 Food Items Bought in Sachet/Mini Size and Tingi

FOOD ITEM MINI (%) FOOD ITEM TINGI (%)

Coffee 17 Cooking Oil 64

The mini-sizing phenomenon has allowed millions of cash-strapped Filipinos to stretch their ever shrinking budgets to buy basic commodities.

Creamer 7 Soy sauce 46

Juice 6 Vinegar 42

Chocolate powder 4 Salt 25

Soy sauce 3 Sugar 22

Milk/milk powder 3 Fish sauce 12

Vinegar 3 Pepper 8

Cooking oil 2 Candy 8

Food flavoring/Powdered juice 1 Rice 4

Tomato sauce/MSG 1 Garlic 4

Source: Asiabus April 2004, Synovate Philippines

Mini-sizes also rule in the canned meat category. TNS saw that since 2003, more and more people have been buying canned food in 100- to 200-gram size, which now eat up more than half the market-volume share.

But it is the flexible or sachet phenomenon that is perhaps one of the most visible aspects of micro-marketing. Macapagal says it was the use of composite materials or flexibles that enabled Unilever to downsize its products. In fact, Unilever Philippines claims to be the first in the country to package shampoos in flexibles. That was back in the late 1970s when it commissioned the very first British sacheting machine. The simple technology of coupling polyethylene or PE, with plastic, and topping that with another layer of PE allowed Unilever to produce Clinic shampoo in pillow pack, the forerunner of today's sachets. Toothpaste in aluminum packs followed, skin products came next, and food in sachets just recently.

"When I saw our Mayo, Say Cheez coming out in sachets, I was pretty excited," says Macapagal. "If you can find value in doing it in sachets for personal care, there's value doing it for the food side."

PACKAGING a la Lilliput itself is not an entirely new idea, though, and has been in use for decades in the airline and fast-food businesses. Up until recently, however, it had not been applied to target the individual consumer — with the exception of the homegrown tingi-tingi system, or by-the-piece selling that has long been practiced in this country. Even P&G's Chua admits that the manufacturers are Johnnies-come-lately in selling stuff the tingi way.

All over the Philippines, neighborhood sari-sari stores and stalls at the wet market employ a crude system of repacking items into smaller quantities. Food items are the most popular candidates for micro-repacking, and it is common to see oil, vinegar, pepper, sugar, or achuete sold in tiny, plastic bags. They used to go for as low as five centavos each, but today the price is at P1 to P5.

Steve Villarize, who has run his own sari-sari store for the last 21 years, still sells in tingi. "Even in the past, people were buying in tingi because that's what they could afford,"

he says. "Cooking oil, soy sauce were measured in cups and then transferred to the bottle or

glass brought by the customer." His wife says that hard drinks were also sold in tingi, "paisa-isang shot."

The preponderance of the tingi system is borne out by a consumer preferences survey of Synovate, the market research arm of global communications specialist Aegis Group PLC. Sixty-three percent of the respondents bought items in tingi, with the D and E segments making up the majority. Of those who live by tingi, 17 percent said they bought nonfood items while 94 percent said they bought food, primarily cooking oil, soy sauce, vinegar, salt, and sugar.

Reasons Consumers Buy Sachet/Mini Size and Tingi

REASON MINI (%) TINGI (%)

Price (e.g. cheap, affordable, can buy with just P1) 42 32

Economy (e.g. fits the budget, able to save, just the right amount) 39 29

Contents (e.g. many contents, small size, little content) 1 1

Usage (e.g. easy to carry, can control usage, good for 2 persons) 31 17

Purchase (e.g. readily available, to save time in buying) 32 46

Source: Asiabus April 2004, Synovate Philippines

The unique retail structure of the Philippines has also fueled the move toward smallness. Sari-sari stores — often little, wooden huts carrying 50 items or less — account for nearly 90 percent of the country's total retail outlets. TNS's Asiapanel division notes that in 2003 the traditional trade continued to gain share in the market, particularly in poorer rural areas. According to AC Nielsen, these small neighborhood stores have grown to nearly 560,000, making them the top retail outlets in the Philippines. That number is expected to rise to over 900,000 in five years.

In places like Japan, Thailand, and Hong Kong, modern trade retailers remain bullish in the sector where hypermarkets and discount stores continue to grow. But nations like the Philippines and Vietnam have a less developed trade structure, with traditional stores outperforming modern supermarkets. Based on the 2004 results of its Consumer Panel Survey spanning four years from 2001, TNS observes that expenditures at sari-sari stores have grown over time, with 42 percent of all purchases coming from these outlets. Supermarket expenditures, meanwhile, have been flat while consumer spending in grocery stores has been declining.

So strong has been the performance of sari-sari stores, Abad says, that when a manufacturer comes in and first looks at the retail trade structure, he wonders, "How am I going to sell the 400-ml in a small store?"

P&G's Chua says that because a lot of the sari-sari stores in poor neighborhoods have a small rolling capital, products in these stores are "100 percent" sachets or mini-size. In fact, he says, stores in squatter areas would have no products in bottles at all.

Though sari-sari stores may impose uneven markups, consumers find these stores more convenient, especially for emergency purchases. Teresa Deocaresa of TNS says sari-sari stores have evolved into some sort of the Pinoy's extended pantry. The fact that they provide credit gives them another plus in the harried consumer's budget book.

AC Nielsen notes that while the "AB class prefers wide product assortment, the DE would buy on need basis, mostly small-size packs and on credit." And while these consumers buy in smaller volumes, it says, their huge number make up for the slack. For the supermarkets alone, data show that the D and E segments account for more than P61 billion in estimated sales annually while the A and B classes contribute only about P5 billion. Sachets and products in smaller packages enjoy wider reach in rural areas than in urban areas, says AC Nielsen.

Overall, shampoo, detergent, soap, and toothpaste remain the top (and growing) items in the nonfood category, according to TNS. These products, apart from being the most basic necessities of a consumer, all happen to come in sachets or smaller packs. Even favric softeners are now fast becoming sachet-driven, says TNS account executive Omar Carlos.

THE DOWNSIZING phenomenon, which Unilever's Macapagal says started largely in the Philippines, has caught fire in other countries in the region, particularly in India and Indonesia. These countries, he says, have a high ratio of low-income earners with minimal disposable income. Manufacturers in India have had to shift to smaller pack sizes with the growing demand for lower-priced goods in towns and villages.

But there would be no such mass mini-sizing without a more complex technology of packaging, which has enabled manufacturers to produce metallized, multi-layer sachets called flexible composites. The result is light but very strong packaging. A shampoo sachet, for example, would have thick plastic as its first layer. The second layer is aluminum that protects the product from the sun, thus preventing chemical reactions that might cause the contents to deteriorate; it also serves as a barrier to contain the fragrance of the product. The next layer would be for printing that is then coated with another type of plastic to protect the ink engraved on the surface.

"Packaging serves as our window to the consumer," says Christophe Joyeux, development manager for Unilever Philippines. "It's what the consumer sees. From the marketing point of view, the function of the packaging is to be able to say this is the product, its content."

Packaging's second function is to protect the product from the sun, especially when placed in a sari-sari store. Joyeux stresses that the wrong type of packaging could result in, say, bacteriological contamination of shampoo. A home cleaner or a shampoo should be able to last for two years in a sari-sari store although its average lifetime would be three months, he says.

Macapagal points out that it was flexible packaging that made sacheting for food possible and started brainstorms among food manufacturers who began asking themselves, "What is realistically worth consuming in such a size?" Snacks was one of the answers. Macapagal notes that while Unilever used to offer soups only in a family pack for four to five people, it now has a 15-gram, single-serve soup a busy office worker can enjoy even without leaving the workplace. "If you're hungry…just pour water and you have your soup ready," he says.

Yet while convenience has certainly been one of the come-ons of buying in sachets, consumers cite price as their number-one reason for purchasing downsized items. And it's not only because they just a few pesos to spare. Filipinos actually end up saving when they buy items in sachets versus goods in plastic or glass bottles. It's the exact opposite of what is happening in the United States, where the consumer market has grown bulk-obsessed and gone for super-sized products in part because they believe they save money in doing so.

Sari-sari store buyer

Production-wise, sachets are 10 to 20 percent cheaper than other types of packaging because they consume less packaging material, explains Joyeux. The selling price correspondingly goes down. At Unilever, for example, the suggested retail price of a 100-ml bottle of shampoo is P48. A 10-ml sachet of shampoo costs P3.15, which means 10 sachets, equivalent to 100 ml, will total only P31.50.

"When you buy a sachet, you pay less packaging material than when you buy a bottle. Consumers pay for the product, not the packaging. And that's what makes it (sacheting) a success; it's low cash outlay," Joyeux says.

The same holds true for some food items, although the savings aren't as much as in nonfood goods in sachets. For instance, a consumer would pay just P1.75 more when he buys a 385-ml bottle of Silver Swan Soy Sauce instead of purchasing several smaller plastic pouches equivalent to the same amount of toyo. And in some cases, it's cheaper to buy food in bigger cans and boxes than in sachets. Buying a 500-gram tin of Milo chocolate powder, for example, would result in savings of P10 compared to buying the same amount in 80-gram sachets.

PRICE POINTS aside, micro-marketing has also given the lower-income group access to branded, hygienically packaged goods. Rather than having mayonnaise or ketchup dispensed from large containers in wet-market stalls, consumers can now have them for almost the same price in single-serve or foil packs. In India, where increasing health consciousness has prompted the move toward packaged, branded formats, people are now more conscious about the quality of water, standard cooking oil, and calorie intakes, Euromonitor reports. This is the reason flexible packaging is fast becoming popular for food items like milk and biscuits.

In the Philippines, downsizing used to be primarily about cost but secondary benefits have kept the trend going strong, says Abad of TNS. Controlled usage is one such benefit. A consumer tends to use more of a product when it comes in a bottle or box, Abad says, but perceives the sachet to contain just about the right amount.

Top 10 Food Corporations

COMPANY NAME GROSS REVENUES(in million pesos)

RANK IN TOP 1000 CORPORATIONS by gross revenue (2003)

Nestle Philippines Inc. 53,373 9

San Miguel Corp. 49,811 12

Coca-Cola Bottlers Philippines Inc. 30,258 19

San Miguel Foods Inc. 26,930 24

Universal Robina Corp. 19,874 33

Unilever Philippines Inc. 16,779 40

Jollibee Foods Corp. 13,912 49

Dole Philippines Inc. 12,932 52

Monde Nissin Corp. 12,132 56

Del Monte Philippines Inc. 8,814 85

Synovate's data show that for the A, B, and C classes, one of the main reasons for buying single-serves or mini-sizes is that usage is controlled (they also liked the packets' handy size that make them easy to carry around).

Abad says consumers have also somehow developed a perception that small packs tend to be more concentrated, in the same way that they feel soda drinks in one- to two-liter bottles tend to lose their fizz faster than those in 12-ounce cans. That's not true, of course, but as Abad points out, "You have people buying 12 sachets from the supermarket, and it's not because they're trying to scrimp."

Sociologist Arnel de Guzman, however, has another theory about the sachet mania in this country. "On the surface it's an economic necessity; the poor cannot buy in bulk," he says. "(But) I tried to look at it on a theoretical basis, and one possible explanation is na-instill na yung 'smallness' mentality. It reflects the Filipino mentality. This is everyday culture, it's a lifestyle and we cannot get out of the near-sightedness and smallness."

Abad, though, has a much less negative view. She says that downsizing not only allows the D and E classes to buy what they need at the moment, it also offers the average consumer variety and a chance to get to know the product. Or as Macapagal says, "How can you fall in love with a product if you haven't tried it?"

Micro-managing also addresses the variety of wants in a family, he notes. "The ones with children, what are they buying? They've got four children, they have four different things that they want. You can't buy one big container to just satisfy one," Macapagal says.

That's a situation mothers like Gemma Candelaria find themselves in frequently. In the her home, she's the only one who likes the Cheezee spread and Nescafe coffee. Only one of her kids likes Milo. Some of her children prefer soap over shampoo for their hair. There used to be a lot of whining, but now she's able to satisfy everyone by buying in sachets. Marketing whizzes themselves can't stop smiling. And so long as we have a basket case of an economy, they will continue chanting, "It's a small, small world" as cash registers ring merrily in the background.

http://pcij.org/i-report/1/mini-size.html

SIDEBAR

THEY MAY be small and convenient for consumers, but those sachets and pouches that are the current toast of the manufacturing world has become a considerable environmental headache.

Like a lot of plastics, these packaging materials, known as flexibles, laminates, or composite materials consisting of several layers of either the same or different materials (plastic, ink, metal), are recyclable. But making them reusable is more complicated than recycling paper, cartons, metals, glass, and rigid plastics.

The collection of empty sachets and other waste flexibles from households for turnover to recycling facilities is even trickier. Households, paleros (garbage truck helpers), and even scavengers have shown no interest, much less made a move to sort and collect them. As a result, nearly all waste flexibles are dumped at the landfill, according to a waste analysis and characterization study done last year by the multinational Unilever Philippines.

The study examined 15 tons of garbage collected by a garbage contractor from wet markets and residential and commercial areas in Manila and then taken to Pier 18 before landing at their final destination: a landfill in Montalban, Rizal. Pier 18 is one of two major garbage transfer stations in Metro Manila. It handles 800,000 of the three million tons of trash generated each year by the city's 11 million inhabitants. The other station is in Payatas, Quezon City, through which 1.6 million tons of garbage passes every year.

Carry bags or supermarket bags form the bulk of the ugly plastics clogging the Montalban landfill. Those from food products account for as much as 10 percent, while empty sachets of soap, detergent, and cosmetics make up five percent. The low figures of their garbage notwithstanding, Unilever and other members of the Soap and Detergent Association of the Philippines are seeking ways to entice Filipinos to recycle empty sachets as they would other packaging materials, says Christophe Joyeux, Unilever Philippines' development manager.

Unilever itself is active in developing the recycling technology for flexibles. It has so far been successful in producing hollow blocks and bricks out of empty sachets and detergent wrappers coming from its factory. The flexibles are shredded and ground into 16-mm pieces and then mixed with other ingredients, including liquid wastes also from its factory, to produce ingredients for the construction materials. Unilever is still working on the technology to produce construction boards from waste sachets by hot molding.

Heeding a suggestion by Leonarda Camacho of the Linis Ganda program, Unilever has entered into a tie-up with Union Cement where energy from roughly shredded and uncompacted waste sachets is recovered to help fuel the kiln used to manufacture cement. In Europe and the United States, laminate and other plastic wastes are already being used in cement processing. Explains Joyeux: "Plastic is petroleum. What people don't realize is sachet material has the calorific value of coal: One kilo of this generates as much energy as one kilo of coal."

Because the kiln to which the sachets are fed manually is fired at temperatures ranging from 1,100 (end temperature) to 2,000 degrees (at the furnace part), the plastic instantly decomposes into its primary ingredients — polyethylene or PE in this case — and emits no toxic fumes, according to Joyeux.

Since the last quarter of 2004, Unilever has been trucking one to two tons of waste sachets to Union Cement nearly every week. But all these emanate from its factory. The challenge now facing Unilever and other manufacturers of sacheted products is how to collect the empty packets and other flexibles from consumers for recycling.

If flexibles were only a high-value product, there really should be no problem. A Unilever survey on recyclable materials being bought by junkshops shows wires priced at P90 a kilo, aluminum cans at P48 a kilo, hard plastics at P1 kilo, transparent plastic bottles at P27 a kilo, tin cans at P3 a kilo, and rum bottles at 50 centavos apiece. These attractive rates explain why these and other items are sought after by door-to-door collectors, by paleros who haul them onto garbage trucks where sorting immediately commences, by scavengers either waiting at the transfer stations or living near sanitary landfills. With all the sorting taking place, the trash that eventually winds up in the landfills consists mostly of organic wastes such as food wastes, dried leaves, wood, diapers (80.4 percent), plastic bags (12.8 percent), and wrappers from foods, paper (1.9 percent), soap, detergents and cosmetics (1.5 percent), says Unilever's study on wastes.

But as waste flexibles are low in value, Unilever expects scant interest from paleros. Neither does the company find it practical or economical to recover the sachets at the landfill. "It's much more economical to try to get them from homes, where most of our things are disposed," says Chito Macapagal, Unilever's general manager for corporate development.

Marketing strategies that have consumers surrendering empty sachets in anticipation of prizes may be one way of recovering waste flexibles. "That's a very good source of a homogenous postconsumer recovery," Macapagal says. "The only thing is it's not sustainable because you can't do promotions every year."

To help in its search for incentives for people to recycle flexibles, Unilever is set to undertake two studies this year. One will be done with help from the education department's Manila schools division and will analyze wastes house-by-house by getting schoolchildren to bring their garbage at home to school. "Our goal is to confirm if people are willing to give it (flexibles) away," Joyeux says. The study is also intended to find out the inducements for people to recover empty sachets.

The other study will involve scavengers who would be provided incentives to collect waste flexibles from homes to enable Unilever to measure the kind and amount of packaging that can be retrieved.

For flexible recycling to succeed, Unilever knows it can't go it alone. "On the average, there are only two grams of flexible packaging of soap and detergent per family per day," says Joyeux. "If I ask a scavenger to go to a home for two grams, it's not gonna work."

That's why the multinational firm is convincing not only the soap, detergent, and cosmetics industry, but also the food industry to get involved. The sooner manufacturers put their heads and hands together, the better for the environment. — Yvonne T. Chua and Avigail Olarte

http://pcij.org/i-report/1/trash.html

by Luz Rimban

HOW DO we love corned beef? Let us count the ways Filipinos amplify the contents of a small can of corned beef to feed their ever-growing families. There are the pinches of corned beef tucked into pan de sal for quick sandwiches. Or baked in buns to make corned beef rolls a la siopao. Or sautèd in garlic and onions (tomatoes optional), then mixed with sliced chili peppers and diced potatoes before being added to beaten eggs frying in a pan and seasoned with salt and ground black pepper for omelets with a kick.

Cattle beef is considered a high-end food. But there's very little of it in your can of corned beef. [photos by Luz Rimban]

You can also leave out the eggs and the chili peppers: just sautè the corned beef in onions, garlic, and tomatoes, garnish with potatoes and cabbage or pechay (Asian lettuce), before throwing in some water and letting the whole thing simmer for a bit. Season to taste and you have the ultimate Filipino corned beef dish, the modest local equivalent of the miracle of loaves and fish. This is the recipe that transforms corned beef in a tiny 100-gram tin (the size of two matchboxes) into a savory stew a family of six or more can spoon over rice and feast on — and for just one-tenth the price of a cup of Starbucks cappuccino or even half the price of a 1.5-liter bottle of cola. Quite easily, every mouthful of corned beef con kanin conjures visions of a nutritionally balanced world where meat, a major source of protein sorely lacking in the Filipino diet, is plentiful and cheap.

It’s no surprise then that local canned corned beef has become a P7-billion-a year industry, accounting for nearly half of the processed-meat business. But there are some not-so-secret secrets behind that success, and it doesn’t have anything to do with what corned-beef endorser Aga Muhlach really eats at home. Actually, clues are on the can itself, but too many Filipinos don’t bother reading beyond the price tag. Which means they really don’t know what they’re eating.

Printed on most local corned beef labels, for example, is something like this: “May contain cooked cattle or buffalo meat.” The labels also say other ingredients such as soy protein known as “extenders” or “extensions” went into that can. Put another way, Filipinos may be imagining cows from Argentina gave up their lives so they could one day make it to the Philippines in itty-bitty cans. In reality, however, the beef in local canned corned beef is buffalo — more precisely the curly horned kind from nearby India — and the portions of it in the can are probably much, much less than what corned-beef lovers think. The harsh truth all corned beef lovers should know is this: there’s very little beef in that can, and it’s probably carabao. But then, there’s more nuggets than chicken in chicken nuggets, and you don’t really want to know what goes into those tender, juicy hotdogs.

AS FAR as food scientists and nutritionists are concerned, says agriculturist Emelina Lopez, one of the biggest challenges in these tough times is “to make nutritious food affordable to Filipinos.” That challenge has driven meat-processing companies into finding ways of making processed meat products lighter on Filipino pockets. How they do it, considering the astronomical prices of pork and beef, means two things: that the meat content in processed products like corned beef is shrinking, and that the meat, beef especially, is the cheapest variety there is. How else could the smallest tin of corned beef cost anywhere between P10 and P15?

And so meat processors”“play around” with the formulations of meat products like corned beef and hotdog, varying the proportions of meat and extenders, says Lopez, who heads the Meat Processing Unit of the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) Animal Products Development Center. The extenders bring down the prices of these meat products and are still sources of protein, but no match for the protein coming from real pork, chicken, or beef. But that also means the Filipino version of corned beef is a double extended dish — extended in the can, and then extended in the cooking with the addition of vegetables and spices.

Meat-processing companies are coy about the percentage of pork or beef and textured vegetable protein (TVP) in their products. But Lopez says the more obscure and cheaper brands of hotdog may contain only 20 percent lean meat and about 10 percent fat, with the rest of the ingredients nonmeat, like two to three percent curing mix (common salt, nitrite salt, phosphate, and erythorbate), spices, extenders (protein sources like TVP and gluten), fillers (carbohydrate source

The beef in local canned corned beef is actually buffalo — the curly horned kind from India.

like flours and starches), and ice. Yes, ice — crushed, Lopez specifies — because keeping things cold is important in the processing of the products. Anyway, she says, with that much starch mixed in, the water from the melting ice would be absorbed very easily.

“Nobody really declares that there are extenders,” declares Ellen Almendrala, in charge of Research and Development for corned beef at Swifts Foods Inc. Swifts’ most saleable corned-beef product is its Carne Norte, a variety popular among the C, D, and E crowd. Carne Norte, she says,’“is intended for guisado or sautè. So nilalagyan ng flavor, mas enhanced to cover up the extenders. The flavor and aroma mask the extenders.”

Both she and Lopez insist that even with extenders, canned corned beef is nutritious. But Lopez makes it a point to stress that the nutrient Filipinos need most is protein, and if meat processors overdo the fillers in their products, then these will inevitably fail to meet the Pinoys’ protein requirements, and be just another source of carbohydrates.

Different varieties of corned beef products contain varying proportions of actual beef. Almendrala says Swifts used to have its own variety of premium quality corned beef that had larger amounts of beef. But the line fell out of favor because it was not as profitable as the less beefy Juicy Corned Beef and Carne Norte products that are currently Swifts’ runaway bestsellers.

Because Filipinos prefer their corned beef a little soupy, Swifts’ Foods Inc makes it juicy, unlike the imported variety, which is dry. The local version also has a different thread size from imported corned beef that, Almendrala says, has a higher fat content and finer threads of beef. Imported corned beef is sliceable because in Western countries, it is eaten mostly as sandwich fillings and cold cuts, while the Filipino version is meant to be mashed and sautèd into viands or rice toppings.

NO MATTER the respective market preferences and the varying recipes for preparing corned beef, though, it is traditionally supposed to be nothing more than cured beef. Here’s a bit of trivia: corned beef has nothing to do with corn, “corning” being a method of curing and preserving beef in a mixture of “corns” or grains of salt and nitrite. According to the DA’s Animal Product Development Center (APDC), nitrite is what gives corned beef its bright red color. It is also what prevents the growth of microbes. Training handouts provided by the APDC state that “sodium nitrite is poisonous in high concentrations” and can be carcinogenic; hence, nitrite is supposed to be used only in minute quantities.

Where local and imported brands differ, however, is in the origins of the beef that is corned. Imported brands use cattle beef from South America or Australia. Local ones use buffalo meat, the kind imported frozen from India, which is much cheaper than those sourced from buffalo raisers in the country or anywhere else in the world.

Veterinary quarantine certificates (VQCs) issued by the Department of Agriculture for the importation of meat and meat products show that meat processors have been importing boneless buffalo meat or meat trimmings from India in large quantities over the years. Aside from RFM Food Corporation, parent company of Swifts Food Inc, meat processing companies importing frozen buffalo meat from

India include the Pacific Meat Company, which produces the highly popular Argentina as well as the 555 corned beef; Purefoods, the food subsidiary of San Miguel Corporation; Foodsphere Inc, makers of CDO corned beef; as well as the smaller meat processors like Pampanga’s Best and Mekeni Foods.

Pinoys love beef, especially in cans, but the local animal industry can barely meet the demand.

“Talagang we source it from India,” says Almendrala, who laments that the local buffalo or cattle industry simply cannot meet the demands of meat processors for huge volumes and cheaper prices, that are in turn meant to satisfy consumer demands for reasonably priced corned beef.

Data from the Department of Science and Technology and the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics show that the importation of buffalo meat started in 1993 during the term of then President Fidel Ramos who opened the country’s doors to trade liberalization. That year, just a little over 400 metric tons was imported. By 2000, buffalo meat importation had grown to nearly 40,000 metric tons, some 1,000-percent growth in just seven years.

Importers buy Indian buffalo for about P50 per kilo, transportation and importation costs included. Compare that with P80 per kilo of local carabao beef or carabeef, or P190 to P270 per kilo of cattle beef. The Philippines, after all, has just about three million heads of water buffalo, most of which are traditionally used as draft or work animals. India has a surfeit of buffalo — some 98 million heads, which Indians, many of them vegetarian, tap mostly for milk and not for meat.

Dr. Libertado Cruz, executive director of the Philippine Carabao Center (PCC) in Muñoz, Nueva Ecija, was part of the DA team that went to India in 1993 and 1994 to assess the impact Indian buffalo imports would have on the local market. He recalls, “We said that if we do not allow the importation of buffalo meat into the Philippines to meet the increased consumption of meat, particularly beef, there will come a time when we will source it locally. Our breeding base is not sufficient to meet that growing requirement. So we might be breeding carabaos or water buffalos and the market might be taking more than the breeders can produce. And we don’t like that to happen.”

IN 1993, the Agriculture Department allowed buffalo meat importations, but only for the meat processing industry. There were other conditions attached to the importation: it should be free of the dreaded foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), it should be deboned and deglanded, the bones and glands being where the virus germinates, and the meat should be chilled. Chilling removes any trace of virus, if ever, and the curing and processing of the meat further ensures this.

DA rules specify that only meat processors can import Indian buffalo meat. “The importers are the only ones given import permits,” Cruz explains. “If you’re not a processor, there’s no way you can import meat, because the assumption is, if you’re not a processor and you import meat, where are you going to use it? So you are going to sell that in the open market.”

In the Agriculture Department, it is the National Meat Inspection Service and the Bureau of Animal Industry that checks on whether the amount of meat imported by processing companies tallies with their requirement and the capacity of their processing facilities. Ideally, they are supposed to import only enough for their requirements.

But there have been instances when imported Indian buffalo meat hoofed its way into wet markets in Metro Manila. In 2004, the Anti-Smuggling Task Force of the Department of Agriculture conducted raids on wet markets and confiscated, in one wet market alone, a hundred kilos of buffalo meat imported from India. Hog raisers also believe that cheap imported buffalo meat is driving consumers away from pork and may be killing the local hog industry.

All these have made the issue of buffalo meat importation a touchy issue in agriculture sector. It also reveals how the local cattle and carabao industries are ill-equipped to meet the demands of Filipino consumers for beef, even as some livestock growers grouse that India has not been declared free of FMD, and that importing from a country not yet free of FMD will make it difficult for the government to get Luzon off the FMD blacklist.

But this barrage of issues is no match against the single strongest argument for importation that meat processing companies and importers have used so far: consumers are entitled to beef at the lowest prices, no matter that it happens to be buffalo meat imported from India, and no matter that it may eventually get lost in a watery dish called Pinoy corned beef.

LIKE IT or not, too, Bumbay buffalo will be the ingredient local corned-beef makers will be using for sometime yet to justify labeling their products as meat. For now, having a full-blown local carabao industry that produces milk and meat remains just a hazy vision. Many agriculturists partly blame this to the Filipinos’ aversion to carabao meat, which they used to call carabeef. Filipinos have the impression that carabao meat is tough, an impression that goes back to an old law, which agriculturists refer to as the “7-11 slaughter ban.” Then and now, carabaos were kept mainly as draft or work animals; it used to be that farmers were forbidden from slaughtering carabaos unless these were older than seven years if male and 11 years if female. As a result, only retired carabaos that had lean and tough meat ended up in the wet markets.

The ban has long been lifted but the aversion remains. Many Filipinos are still unwilling to partake of carabao or buffalo meat and will probably not relish the idea of knowing it is actually what’s in processed meat, especially corned beef. But it’s not only because they think they will lose their teeth trying to bite into carabao meat. If Hindus have sacred cows, Filipino farmers tend to regard their trusty work companions pretty much like sacred carabaos, treating these almost like family. It would be unthinkable for many of them to regard an animal they had depended on for so long and spent many hours with out in the field as potential dinner. As PCC project manager Nur Baltazar observes,’“Ang kalabaw kakambal na ng pagsasaka, pantrabaho (Carabaos are seen as crucial in farming, as important work helpers).””

Such notions have left the likes of Cruz sighing. Cattle beef has always been thought of as high-end or elite beef, but according to Cruz, the meat of a two-year-old carabao is just as tasty as the prime cuts consumers get from the best cattle meat. He also points out that”“in international categorization, beef is defined as meat from either cattle or buffalo” and one is no less edible than the other.

Buffalo, including the Philippine water buffalo, also yields healthy meat because it is grass-fed and therefore organically grown, and has less cholesterol content. A study done by the Cancer Research and Radiation Biology Laboratory of the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute compared cattle, carabao, human, and processed milk and found Philippine carabao milk to be the most likely source of anti-cancer protein. Yet at present, only 12,000 head of carabaos are being used for milk in the Philippines, too small to make any dent in the local milk industry.

While Filipinos take their time getting over their biases against carabao meat, the Philippine Carabao Center is currently focusing on improving the native carabao’s genetic make, which has deteriorated over the years. PCC studies show that the Philippine carabao, overworked as a farm animal, has grown smaller and leaner. That’s also because farmers have been castrating bigger carabaos to prevent them from mating, during which time they become fierce and uncontrollable, and a liability to farming, leaving the smaller and thinner ones to breed.

The PCC wants to develop a bigger breed of Philippine carabaos, which is why these days the spacious PCC grounds in rustic Nueva Ecija are hosting a horde of riverine buffalos with curly horns (also known as murrah buffalos). The Indian imports are being readied for mating with the local swamp or water buffalos we know as the Philippine carabao. Four generations of crossbreeding, says Cruz, will eventually produce a local version that is bigger and fatter, the

Supermarket shelves attest to our love of corned beef.

better to produce milk and meat, and not just to slave and starve away in the rice fields alongside the slaving and starving farmer.

In the nearer future, Cruz says, the industry will have to discard the term “carabeef” and all the negative connotations that come with it. “Tenderbuff” is how Australians are now calling their buffalo meat, and Cruz says Filipinos might just christen theirs “Nuevabeef,” since Nueva Ecija is where the Carabao Center is located, and where pilot areas for the growing of carabaos for milk and meat is being done.

In the meantime, there will be no other name for local canned corned beef, even if that in itself is actually a crossbreed of extenders and buffalo meat.

http://pcij.org/i-report/1/beef.html

by Alecks P. Pabico

SHE’S BEEN known to talk to plants, but maybe she’s only complimenting them on how delicious they are. A vegetarian for six years now, actress/model/environmentalist Chin-Chin Gutierrez probably only vaguely remembers the taste of meat, but doesn’t look like she regrets eating only vegetables and fruits.

In fact, she looks pretty darn good. But maybe that glow is also coming from her glee over the attention the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and its advocacy of vegetarianism and animal rights are getting these days. The 30-something Gutierrez is among the celebrity endorsers of PETA issues, and while her print ad for the group has yet to appear (Ms. Gutierrez's ad came out a few months after the release of this issue of i Report — Ed's note), PETA is already reporting record queries in the country about what vegetarianism is all about.

Actress-model and environmentalist Chin-Chin Gutierrez has been a vegetarian for six years now. [ad photo courtesy of PETA]

PETA Asia-Pacific director Jason Baker says when he first came to Manila last year, the Philippines was ranked 31st in terms of volume of requests for vegetarian information that PETA got from its website. By November though, the Philippines had shot up to seventh place.

But that’s not all. Local fashion, lifestyle, and cooking magazines have also begun devoting cover stories and features on vegetarianism, vegetarian diets, and recipes. Food courts in malls are gracious hosts to vegetarian restaurants. Fast-food chains like Burger King now sell veggie burger, while Seattle’s Best and Starbucks offer soymilk.

“It’s amazing because you can’t get veggie burger from Burger King in the rest of Asia,” says Baker.”“You have soy milk in Starbucks but in China, which is where it originated, they don’t have it. Starbucks may not be for everyone but when you have soymilk entering the mainstream, you really have a change there. It’s no longer just a vegetarian restaurant on the outskirts of the city that is serving this. And that’s the exciting thing.”

It’s also quite a feat in a carnivorous country like the Philippines, where celebrations inevitably turn into “big lechon happenings” and there are still a considerable number of macho men wanting to turn Bantay into pulutan. Baker thinks PETA’s celebrity-dominant endorsements have a lot to do with the great reception his group is getting. But perhaps it’s also because Filipinos are experiencing multiplying aches and pains brought about by a 24/7 lifestyle and illnesses that can be traced back partly to bad diets or simply bad food. More Filipinos have become conscious of what they are eating, and going vegetarian is just one among many options some are considering to help repair their aching bodies or just to keep healthy. From those who have decided to do away with junk food, there are also those who want to make sure what they eat is as free of human intervention as possible.

EATING, WHICH humans merely used to do as a matter of survival, has indeed become increasingly complicated and dangerous in today’s world of corporate-controlled, technology-driven industrial agriculture. So much so that to satisfy your hunger, you now have to make sure you’re not slowly killing yourself in the process.

Health red flags obviously go up once the animals destined for our stomachs begin falling sick. For years now, fish and other bounty from Philippine waters have succumbed to seasonal plankton infestation commonly referred to as “red tide” and other toxic contaminants like lead, arsenic, and mercury. In addition, diseases have been known to plague factory farm animals from which the food for our everyday sustenance is derived. Filipinos should count themselves lucky that local factory farms have so far been hit only by foot-and-mouth disease, which afflicts pigs. Abroad, cattle have been hounded by mad cow disease while

chickens have fallen prey to the bird flu virus.

Illness outbreaks from food-borne pathogens are likewise becoming common. E. coli, believed to live mostly in the intestines of cattle but which has also been found in the intestines of chickens, deer, sheep, and pigs, has been associated with ingesting contaminated ground beef. Salmonella found in chicken eggs makes more than a million Americans sick every year.

Commercially grown fruits and vegetables, which were thought of earlier as safe, have also been found to be laden with a lot of pesticides and other chemical preservatives. And in the advent of biotechnology, staple grains like rice and corn have been subjected to genetic manipulation, the

Another Filipina model, Isabel Roces, has also graced PETA's vegetarianism ads.

long-term consequence of consuming which may prove inimical to human health as well as to the environment and local agriculture.

The onslaught of a fast-paced lifestyle, which has given rise to fast-food restaurant chains all over the country offering supersized orders of fatty, high-calorie and cholesterol-heavy “value meals,” is also taking its toll on personal health. And if all these are not yet enough to make anyone paranoid about what he is about to put in his mouth, groups like PETA are always at the ready to serve up data designed to be more than food for thought.

PETA’s undercover investigations reveal, for instance, that today’s factory farms subject animals to cruel treatment and inhumane conditions, keeping them in cramped stalls and cages, and often bleed them to death while they are still fully conscious. Animals from factory farms are also fed a steady diet of powerful growth hormones and antibiotics that humans ingest when they eat the animal flesh or drink cow’s milk.

PETA is thus trying to push into the mainstream vegetarianism and veganism (strictly vegetarian regimen shunning even dairy products and eggs), which are derived from the conviction that only a plant-based consumption is truly beneficial to human health — while at the same time helps preserve the environment and promotes animal rights and welfare.

PETA’s arguments are not without backing by medical and scientific researches that serve to debunk people’s earlier notions of their proper dietary requirements. The fact that people with cancer still harbor hopes of beating the illness by eating organically grown food is because doctors and oncologists themselves are prescribing a low-fat, plant-based diet. Vegetarians, scientific evidence has shown, are about 40 percent less likely to get cancer than nonvegetarians.

As studies by leading epidemiological experts like Dr. T. Colin Campbell reveal, “the vast majority of all cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and other forms of degenerative illness can be prevented simply by adopting a plant-based diet.” Eating meat, with its high fat and cholesterol content, has been proven to cause heart disease. Animal protein in meat and dairy products, meanwhile, is the prime carcinogen that causes human cancer.

Diabetes, osteoporosis, obesity, hormonal imbalance and other diseases have also been linked to the consumption of meat and dairy. Cow’s milk, which the dairy industry would have people believe helps prevent osteoporosis, is actually high in animal protein that causes calcium to be leached from the bones. A study of the Harvard Medical School of 75,000 nurses even found that the women who drank the most milk had the most bone fractures.

Chin-chin Gutierrez herself says she turned vegetarian because of health concerns, and specifically because she was alarmed by family members and relatives who had suddenly become afflicted with ailments like diabetes and cancer. But now she also says that with all the pollution in the environment,’“the least thing we could do is to be careful about what we put in our mouths.”

FILIPINO VEGETARIANS aren’t that many yet, and seem to be confined to environmentalists like Gutierrez, along with animal-rights activists and cancer patients. But PETA’s campaign is

certainly gaining converts among the more youthful and trendy lot; Baker says that last year, PETA gave away 25,000 vegetarian starter kits in the country.

PETA’s media-targeted campaign has deliberately been splashy, and last year even released an ad with former “Baywatch” babe

PETA's aggressive campaign for vegetarianism uses both glamour...

Pamela Anderson, clad only in lettuce leaves, urging people to”“turn a new leaf” and go vegetarian. In contrast, the Slow Food campaign has been quietly establishing a foothold among older urbanites. Founded in 1986 by longtime activist Carlo Petrini who started out picketing the first McDonald’s outlet in Rome, Slow Food—yet another reaction to the fast-food lifestyle—now has 80,000 members in 100 countries.

That it is now in the Philippines is largely due to the late Doreen Fernandez. A year before her death in June 2002, the white-haired, bespectacled academic and food critic gathered a small group of people cooking to discuss the idea of launching the slow food movement in the country. She handpicked the group’s members from local food circles who either worked in food preparation, marketing, restaurant operation, teaching and research, or simply loved to cook. The eclectic mix eventually formed the first Filipino Slow Food chapter, or convivium (from the Latin word for feast or banquet), in November 2003.

“Slow Food is for savoring the gustatory pleasures of the world and keeping those pleasures existing,” explains Ipat Luna, an environmental lawyer and one of three members of the group with no direct link to the food industry.”“So the more that people patronize nontraditional, nonseasonal, nonlocal foods, not only is one’s health on the line but also the capacity to keep providing slow food, which is better-tasting and friendly to the planet.”

In other words, Slow Food is the exact opposite of fast food: small-scale, local, seasonal and traditional. And by local, food is not meant to just be grown locally but by someone the consumer knows. As a consequence, Slow Food also frowns on commercial manipulations of food whether it is processed, genetically modified or pesticide-laden.

That’s where the movement’s connection to organics comes in. Organic market entrepreneur Mara Pardo de Tavera, also a convivium member, puts it this way: “With Slow Food, there’s the whole aspect of growing things organically. Because how can you be traditional if you don’t practice traditional farming? Traditional farming is equal to organic. Before the use of chemicals, everything was organic.”

Pardo de Tavera lives and breathes organic food. At one point in her life, she used to tend one of the first natural food stores in New York. She also has a European degree in hotel and restaurant management that further refined her whole concept of food and pointed her toward a more natural lifestyle.

In 1986, after living in the United States for eight years, Pardo de Tavera returned to the Philippines. At first the homecoming seemed a bad idea because she had a hard time finding organic food in Manila. And just a month after her return, she got sick and even contracted chicken pox. “I was so frustrated and so unhappy,” she recalls. “I said to myself“‘why did I come back to this?’ But then I decided to look at the other side of the picture. If I was going through this, I really had my work cut out for me to change peoples’ diets and mindset about food.”

THAT ORDEAL served to inspire her in setting up the first organic market in the country (and the whole of Asia) in 1993. Originally located at the Greenbelt mall park in Makati, the market has had to be relocated twice in the last two years to give way to the park renovations. Today the organic market is open three times a week (Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday), from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., on the side of the mall complex along Legaspi Street.

Organically grown produce as fruits, vegetables, rice and other cereals, free-range chickens, eggs and bangus (milkfish) are sourced from pockets of organic farms in Luzon (Bulacan, Cavite,

...and gore to lure followers.

Nueva Ecija, Zambales, Mountain Province, Benguet, Palawan), Bacolod, and Mindanao (Bukidnon, Cagayan de Oro, Davao).

The choice of Makati was intentional. “It has to be in Makati because we have to set the trend. It has to begin at the top and trickle down,” explains Pardo de Tavera. And in the business scheme of things, the preference for the city could just be as apt as no place makes the same marketing impact as Makati does.

The organic market has since branched out to the equally upscale Alabang Town Center. Pardo de Tavera has also become a regular supplier of the organic food section of Rustan’s Supermarket in Makati and Rockwell. She has her sights now set on putting up an organic supermarket, a one-stop shop for all the needs of people who have opted for an organic lifestyle.

But the growing demand for organic food now comes as well from those with fewer pesos to spare, even areas that cater to the Prada-from-Patpong and DKNY-de-Divisoria crowd have organic markets. Less posh supermarkets now also have organic food sections, some of which even offer organic rice.

The trouble is, consumers can’t be too sure if what they are buying is organic or not. There is no government regulation on organics certification and labeling. At least with the markets managed by Pardo de Tavera, they can be assured that the produce are certified organic. At this time, only Pardo de Tavera does her own independent checking, which even extends to the process of production.

Known to be “autocratic” about keeping a reputation for being strictly organic, Pardo de Tavera has no qualms with booting out dishonest concessionaires from the markets she manages, giving them only a day’s notice and no second chance. “It’s because I also eat the food,” she says. “Everything we sell here, I bring home. That’s my lifestyle, always has been.”

So it also ends up being the obligation of the consumer to find out. Anyway, organic producers are voluntarily labeling their goods. Some consumers are also trying to grow their own vegetables in the backyard — the ones that only need regular care and no fertilizers like kangkong (swamp cabbage), sayote (chayote), and alugbati (Ceylon spinach).

But many organic foods are still priced out of the reach of low-income buyers. Pardo de Tavera admits that her organic markets’ produce are a bit more expensive.

“It’s because we’re not even hitting half of one percent of the market in Metro Manila,” she says. “We still have a limited market outreach. On top of it, we don’t get subsidies from government — no assistance, no one who’d provide capital for a delivery truck. The farmers have to develop their own farms, manage themselves enough to come to this market and sell.”

The output of organic farms is definitely no match to that of commercial farms that spray a lot of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers to boost harvests. All that organic farmers have are the manual inputs of composting and killing pests with their bare hands.

ALTHOUGH HEALTH-conscious consumers represent just a small segment of the population, they are generally well-heeled. That makes them a very lucrative market.

Multinational firms have thus lost no time setting up subsidiaries or funding companies devoted to producing products alternately labeled as “low-fat,” “low-sodium,”

Movements advocating "slow food" and other modes of alternative eating are gaining ground. [photo courtesy of PETA]

“vegan,” or “nonmeat.” It’s a development that has pleased some consumers who want to eat healthy but don’t want to sweat too much trying to find stuff their doctors would approve of. But not all alternative food activists see it positively.

PETA’s Baker at least allows that change will have to come by embracing the mainstream. As one who cares about the suffering of animals and the end to eating meat the most, he says that the vegetarian and vegan options that companies now offer — whether forced by economics or by society — is saving animals’ lives, probably more than he can ever do in his lifetime.

“I really believe that over the last 20 years, people are not relaxing more, not spending more time cooking at home, eating more packaged foods, eating more at fast-food restaurants,” he says.

“So I really don’t believe that the trend is gonna reverse. There’s going to be more of these. It’s not one I have the ability to stop or fight.”

Baker’s advice therefore is to support veggie burger at Burger King, as well as similar vegan alternatives as these are huge steps in the right direction.’“If we don’t and they get rid of it,” he says, “they’ll never have one again.”

But slow foodies like Luna like to make an exception. “We feel that processed food is processed food, which still doesn’t respond to the issue of fast life,” she insists. “And when you investigate who owns these companies, you go back to the same corporations that fund research on GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and their commercialization.”

A case in point is the Hain Pure Food Co. owned by Hain Celestial Group Inc. whose brands (Arrowhead Mills, Bearitos, Breadshop, Celestial Seasonings, Earth’s Best Baby Food, Garden of Eatin, Health Valley, Imagine Foods, Terra Chips, Westbrae, Millina’s, Mountain Sun, Shari Ann’s, Walnut Acres) make up about half of the products sold in health food stores. One of its principal stockholders is the biotechnology company Monsanto. Hain also has a tie-up with multinational food and agriculture giant Cargill to develop’“enhanced foods” for the health-conscious.

“If you have a political conviction on slow food, you won’t buy these brands because your money goes to Monsanto,” says Luna. “If only for health reasons, then probably you would. But you just can’t separate the personal from the

political. The health of the person is tied up to the health of the planet.”

For Gutierrez who says she’s not into converting people, the little things that the likes of Burger King are doing is a straightforward business signal that they’re accommodating consumers’ needs. “It’s not being pretentious,” she says. “It has to earn. It’s a business.”

What is important, she says, is for individuals to try to carve out a lifestyle that’s sustainable and stick to it. Gutierrez says, “It’s not enough that you’re not doing anything wrong or hurting anyone. No. By not acting and making some difference, you’re actually agreeing to a culture that doesn’t sustain life — the lives of people, animals, the environment, and of future generations.”

Markets selling organic and other health food are sprouting all over Metro Manila. [photo by Alecks P. Pabico]

Where to Buy Organics

Organic MarketGreenbelt, Makati open Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Alabang Town Square, Muntinlupa open Thursdays from 7 a.m. to 12 noon

Rustan's SupermarketRockwell and Makati branches

Organic Producersalong Katipunan Avenue (near Miriam College Gate 2) open Tuesdays and Thursdays

Healthy OptionsRustan's Supermarket, Ayala Avenue (near Glorietta)

with branches in SM Megamall, SM City North Edsa, Greenbelt Mall, SM City Manila, Shangri-la Plaza, Festival Supermall, SM Bicutan, SM Pampanga and Cebu

Market OneLung Center, Quezon Avenue, Quezon City open Sundays

Palawan Organic and K-Organics97 Maginhawa Street, U.P. Village, Quezon City

Vegetarian Places

CAFÉS and RESTAURANTS

Balai Vege FoodG/F FAF Building, 123 Visayas Avenue, Quezon City Tel. 4553509

BodhiMadison Square, Ortigas Avenue corner Madison Street, Ortigas with outlets at SM Cubao, Tutuban Center, SM City North Edsa, SM Megamall, SM South Mall, SM City Manila and del Monte and Banawe Streets

offers vegan versions of Filipino dishes, including vegan chicharon

Chimara Neo-Vegan CaféGreenbelt 3, Ayala Center, Makati Tel. 7575652

sells soy ice cream

Daily Veggie N' Café540 Banawe cor. Calamba Streets, Quezon City Tel. 7118209

Greens Café and RestaurantScout Tuazon cor. Scout Castor Streets, Quezon City Tel. 4102440

Happy Veggie Health FoodGilmore Street cor. Aurora Boulevard, Quezon City Tel. 7233854

Jagad Yoga1026 Pasay Road, Makati Tel. 7527271

Karma Free Food Vegetarian CenterRooftop Garden, 4/F Maharlika Bldg., Baguio City

Likha Diwa sa GulodC.P. Garcia Street, Krus na Ligas, Quezon City Tel. 9255522

Manila Sanitarium Hospital Cafeteria45 Donada Street, Pasay City Tel. 5259191

Mother Sachi Vegetarian Restaurant1182 Chino Roces Ave., Makati City Tel. 8978232 8908324

Oh My Gulay Caterers7A Embassy Terrace Homes, Quezon City Tel. 9323856

Quan Yin Chay821 Masangay Street, Sta. Cruz, Manila Tel. 2433356

Satya's Vegetarian Junction2/F Llanar Bldg., 77 Xavierville Avenue, Quezon City Tel. 4266363

sells homemade soy "mayonnaise" and offers mock tuna spread

FAST FOOD

Piazzo'swith branches in Greenbelt and Glorietta

offers soy gelato available in four flavors — coffee, chocolate, vanilla and strawberry

Tater'sGlorietta

also offers soy gelato

Burger Kingsells veggie burger (not listed on menu, order without mayonnaise and cheese)

Seattle's Bestsells soy milk and soy latte

Starbuckssells soy milk and soy latte

Meat Substitutes

Meat Magicavailable at Manila Sanitarium Hospital Cafeteria and Quan Yin Chay

Country Vegefoodsmeat-free products include Ve-G-Sausage, Ve-G-Tapa and Ve-G-Franks available at Rustan's

http://pcij.org/i-report/1/healthy-eating.html

by Ernesto M. Ordoñez

THAT WASN’T your imagination, that was really the sound of your seatmate’s stomach growling. Or maybe it was yours. It’s already a given that more and more Filipinos are going hungry. The question, however, is why.  

Recently, the Social Weather Stations (SWS) revealed that fewer Filipinos went hungry in the last quarter of 2004 compared to the previous quarter the same year. But perhaps that was only because it was the Christmas holidays, which means feasting at whatever cost in this country. The SWS also noted that people have been lowering their standards of living and trying to make do with even less.

The situation doesn’t get better when seen from a five-year perspective. By comparing August/September SWS hunger findings from 2000 to 2004, things look like they have deteriorated, save for a fluke of a year that was 2003, when only 5.1 percent of the respondents told SWS they had gone hungry. In 2000, that figure was at 8.8 percent; by 2004, it was up at 15.1 percent.

But the problem may even be bigger than we think. Mario Capanzana, head of the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI), says the perception of hunger reported by the SWS is different from the objective measurement of per-capita food thresholds. In 2000, the National Statistics Office estimated the food threshold at P7,810 per capita, meaning that each person needed at least P21 worth of food daily in order to survive.

In 2000, the proportion of the population not reaching the food threshold — 21.2 percent — was more than double the SWS hunger perception measure of 8.8 percent that year. There may be more growling stomachs out there than what the surveys reflect, but since the government takes a national census only every five years, more current figures are unavailable. 

There are three possible reasons for the growing hunger among Filipinos:

1. Food production may not be keeping up with our growing population. There simply is not enough food.

2. By the time the food produced at the farm level gets to the consumer, food prices are too high. Many cannot buy at these high retail prices.

3. Some cannot purchase the food they need because they have too little income or what income they have for food has largely been eaten up by inflation.

Let’s look at each possible cause in detail. First, food production: from 1990 to 1999, the Philippine population grew at 2.3 percent while agriculture growth averaged only 2.1 percent. In other words, food production didn’t keep up with the growing population.  

From 2000 to 2004, however, this was no longer the case. The agricultural growth rates were 3.6 percent in 2000, 3.9 in both 2001 and 2002 (a mild El Niño year), 3.7 percent in 2003, and an expected five percent in 2004. These rates are all higher than the 2.3 population growth rate. If that’s the case, why has hunger increased rather than decreased?  

“Remember that the agricultural growth rates reported by government are at the farmgate level, not at the retail level,” says Romeo Recide, agriculture statistics bureau director of the Department of Agriculture (DA). But hunger is felt by consumers who buy food at the retail level. Thus, we must examine what happens from the time the food is actually produced at the farmgate to the time when the consumer actually buys the food at retail, or at the palengke or supermarket.

Photo courtesy of The Manila Times

Table 1 shows a not-so-pretty picture, at least from the hungry consumer’s point of view. Compared to other countries, the margins between the farmgate and retail prices in this country are excessive. For carrots and pork, for example, the retail prices are more than double the farmgate prices.

TABLE 1: Farmgate vs retail prices

PRODUCT FARMGATE RETAILPRICE MARGIN

FARMGATE % OF RETAIL

Carrots P10 P25 P15 40%

Pork P53 P109 P56 49%

Rice (converted from palay) P12 P20 P8 60%

Chicken P63 P89 P26 71%

Bangus P53 P75 P22 71%

“Hunger is not determined by food production alone,” says Capanzana. “It is also determined by food availability and affordability.” Although many consumers can easily afford the farmgate prices of the different food products, these products must first be available to them. This is at the retail level, not at the farmgate. By the time the food reaches the consumer at retail, the prices have increased tremendously. 

Still, while the big disparity between farmgate and retail prices is a cause of hunger, this gap has not changed much over the last few years. “Therefore,” Capanzana concludes, “it is not a major cause for the increase in hunger experienced today.”

SO WHAT has changed that has caused the increase in hunger? Certainly one answer to that question is the decrease in purchasing power and with it, the capacity of consumers to buy food.  

Affecting the affordability of food, which today takes up approximately 60 percent to 70 percent of the average person’s total income, are unemployment and underemployment as well as both overall inflation and food inflation. Table 2 shows changes in these factors over the last five years. 

TABLE 2: Unemployment, underemployment, and inflation

  2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

COMBINED UNEMPLOYMENT and UNDEREMPLOYMENT   Rate   Level 32.9%

9,41428.3%8,659

28.4%8,983

28.4%9,157

29.4%9,822

INFLATION   Overall   Food

4.5%1.9%

6.1%3.9%

3.0%1.9%

3.0%2.0%

5.5%5.8%

In terms of level of unemployed and underemployed, the 29.4-percent rate is the worst in the last four years. With less income from employment, people would obviously have less money to buy food. Let’s not even go to where they are getting the money they are spending.  

But those who still have steady income may not be that happy either. Overall inflation, after all, decreases their purchasing power. From 2000 to 2003, food inflation was always less than overall inflation. But in 2004, this was reversed. The 5.8-percent food inflation rate was higher than the 5.5 percent overall inflation rate. It is also the highest for the last five years. With the double whammy of higher unemployment and underemployment, as well as higher inflation, hunger will inevitably increase.  

What makes matters worse is that we have inequitable growth. About half our income goes to only 20 percent of our population. The latest figures available puts the poverty incidence for 2000 at 34 percent, versus the 33 percent recorded in 1997. There are many more poor people now as compared to 2000, so it is unlikely that the poverty rate has improved.

Yet even during the period from 1985 to 1997 when the poverty incidence dropped from 44 percent to 33 percent, the poorest 20 percent of the population improved their income by only 0.5 percent for every one-percent growth in average income, according to an Asian Development Bank study. Clearly, we should also work on more equitable distribution of income. 

TO SOLVE the problem of hunger, agriculture policy, together with the corresponding agriculture programs, must address all three areas identified earlier: food production, supply chain management, and food affordability through more employment and less inflation.  

TABLE 3: Agriculture comparative advantage ranking among five ASEAN countries

COUNTRY 1970 1980 1990 2000

  Philippines 2nd 2nd 4th 5th

  Thailand 1ST 1ST 2nd 2nd

  Vietnam 5th 4th 1ST 1ST

  Malaysia 2nd 2nd 3rd 4th

  Indonesia 2nd 5th 5th 3rd

As an overview, DA Undersecretary Segfredo Serrano says, “The agriculture sector has gotten out of its boom-and-bust cycle, which showed only a 2.1-percent growth in the 1990s.” Indeed, from 2000 to 2004, the country achieved relatively stable growth, averaging four percent annually. But the combined effect for the last two decades still puts us in last place when compared to four other Southeast countries. A study released in June 2004 by Eliseo Ponce and Cristina David ranks the Philippines’ agriculture comparative advantage against these countries, among them Indonesia, which has been usually been identified as one of the region’s economic laggards. As Table 3 shows, the Philippine performance has been dismal for more than a decade now, with the country dropping to the bottom in 2000. 

Here’s the thing: even though the Philippines was weak in comparative advantage, it opened its markets and decreased its agriculture tariffs. For example, for several vegetables, this country

went from quantitative restrictions to a seven-percent tariff rate. This rate is far lower than the tariff rates of comparable developing countries and way below the 40- percent bound rate allowed by the World Trade Organization (WTO).

What the Philippines did is the opposite of the recommended direction made in a 2004 study by Ha-Joon Chang and Ilene Grabel. This study shows that the economically successful countries, with few exceptions, did not practice free trade during their development phase. Instead, they nurtured their economies until they attained comparative advantage. Only when they were strong enough did they decrease their tariffs significantly.

“We engaged in unilateral disarmament,” says Omi Royandoyan, executive director of the Philippine Peasant Institute. “We volunteered lower rates than were required by the WTO and got little in return. What is worse is that we did this when we were completely unprepared for subsidized cheap imports.” As a result, the country’s ratio of agricultural imports and exports worsened. Between 1992 and 1993, when the Philippines was a net exporter of food, that ratio was at an average of 84 percent. In the last four years, the country has deteriorated into being a net importer of food with an average ratio of 147 percent.

“Simply put,” says Royandoyan, “for every $100 we exported, we imported $147.” 

Today we are asked to decrease even further our already low agricultural tariffs. But since protection is measured by both tariffs and the subsidies given, we should not lower our tariffs if the developed countries do not comply with their commitments to decrease their subsidies.

Federation of Free Farmers’ Cooperatives chair Raul Montemayor says that despite some government officials giving glowing reports of the July 30, 2004 WTO Framework Agreement, the developed countries once again benefited more than the Philippines did. It is true that there is a 20-percent cut in subsidies from the prior WTO Doha Round. But the new amount of $165.9 billion for the United States, the European Union, and Japan is still much higher than their actual 2000 subsidy level of $104.8 billion. Compare that to the $300-million subsidy of the Philippines, and the growl you hear this time around may be emanating from your throat.  

Unless the developed countries appropriately decrease their subsidies, the Philippines must have an agricultural tariff standstill for its agricultural outputs. Once it strengthens its comparative advantage, the Philippines can then embark on a selective and gradual tariff reduction scheme. At the very least, the government should provide the physical and business infrastructure that other countries give their farmers in order to compete globally. To achieve this, the government should provide the appropriate amount of funds — and then make sure these funds are used wisely.  

THE RECIPE for success in food production thus calls for Congress to meet the P32.5-billion annual budget for agriculture mandated in the Agricultural and Fishery Modernization Act (AFMA). In the past, Congress has never approved more than P19 billion for the agriculture department; in the last two years, the department’s annual budget has even been decreased to P15 billion.  

There should also be more transparency. The government, for instance, has attempted to claim that it provided the P1.2 billion for agricultural marketing required by AFMA. But it now turns out that the great majority of these funds were made up of Land Bank loans given to commodity traders.

These loans, which would have been given even without AFMA, have contributed little to Afma’s objective of agriculture modernization.  

However small the DA funds are at present, though, Ricardo Provido, former national coordinator of the country’s 16 regional Agricultural and Fisheries Councils or AFCs, wants to see more transparency regarding their use. So far, the AFCs, which are joint government-private sector bodies, have only a vague notion of how the agriculture department uses its money. Without that kind of information, the AFCs are unable to provide location-specific recommendations for the best use of government funds. At the same time, it renders monitoring almost impossible. Provido says, “We believe the DA should get more resources. But if it is just used for corrupt purposes, then better nothing than something used wrongly.”

Having scarce funds is also no excuse for unwise spending. Today much of the budgeting remains largely centralized, with historical spending as a main basis for determining proposed budget increases. Perhaps it’s time for a decentralized cost-benefit approach.

An example is given by University of the Philippines-Los Baños Chancellor Wilfredo David in his new book Averting the Water Crisis in Agriculture. David laments the fact that because of centralized government decision making, shallow tube wells with the highest Economic Internal Rate of Return (EIRR) of 77 percent received only 11 percent of the budget. By comparison, the National Irrigation System (NIS) with the lowest EIRR of eight percent took 78 percent of the budget. It takes P200,000 to 600,000 to irrigate one hectare using NIS. With shallow tube wells, the expense would be only P25,000. (See Table 4) Though there are cases when only NIS is feasible and others where shallow tube wells are not, David says that the former has generally been overused and the latter underused.

TABLE 4: Comparison of irrigation systems

IRRIGATION TYPE

ECONOMIC INTERNAL RATE OF RETURN (EIRR)

BUDGET DISTRIBUTION

2003 NIA

BUDGET

Shallow Tube Wells 77% 11% P0.5B

Communal 14% 11% P0.5B

National Irrigation System (NIS) 8% 78% P3.7B

There are other ways of getting more bang for our rice production buck. Consider the cost-effectiveness of seed usage versus irrigation: If we were to increase a hectare’s average yield of 3.2 tons from uncertified seeds by 4.8 tons through NIS irrigation, this would cost at least P200,000. But if we used certified seeds for four hectares, this would yield an even higher increased yield of 5.2 tons. Using certified seeds for four hectares comes to a grand total of P2,600, or just a little more than one percent of what we would have to spend for NIS irrigation to achieve the same objective. In so many instances, however, this kind of decentralized cost-benefit approach is not used.

BUT LET’S pretend we somehow did manage to have our food production efficiently done using this more rational approach. Since increased food production doesn’t necessarily mean decreased hunger, we have to move on to looking at supply-chain management.  

Excessive margins between farmgate and retail prices result in low prices for the farmer and high prices for the consumer, leading to less food on the table for both. The farmer will have less money for his food budget, while the consumer can afford less food at high prices. Since this has been going on for years, it’s not a major reason for the increase in hunger. Nevertheless, it remains a major cause of hunger today.

Both the farmer and the consumer constantly blame the middleman as the main culprit for the huge disparity in farmgate and retail prices. Vicente Fabe, chairman of the Pambansang Kilusan ng Samahang Magsasaka (PAKISAMA), the country’s largest farmer organization, even points out that there are times that there are just too many middlemen. “Sometimes, the product passes through as many as six middlemen,” he says. “While they perform a necessary function, we can certainly decrease their layers.” Fabe cites proven examples of achieving this such as bagsakan centers that receive the product directly from the farmers, cooperative buying and selling arrangements using economies of scale, and buy-back contracts with integrators and corporations, among others. 

There are, however, other major causes for the large margins, such as faulty transportation infrastructure and wastage. In fact, improving the physical transportation infrastructure—roads, bridges, ports, etc.—may seem an obvious way to cut costs. With the ongoing financial crisis, though, this is one solution that the country does not have enough resources for. More feasible is decreasing wastage. As measured in postharvest losses, wastage is now at ridiculously high levels, including 28 percent for fruits, 34 percent for rice, and 40 percent for vegetables. Creatively providing access to credit for postharvest facilities to cut this wastage deserves priority attention and could ease the grumbling of stomachs across the country.  

The most effective approach in decreasing hunger among Filipinos, however, would entail increasing employment and decreasing inflation. These would make food more affordable. Two areas that deserve more attention are cited here.

There is an urgent need to concentrate job creation efforts among the poor to solve our inequitable distribution of income. This just hasn’t happened yet. For example, the DA programs for fisheries are heavily oriented toward aquaculture, which recently recorded a 28.4-percent growth rate. Aquaculture, however, takes only a four percent share of the total number of fishers in the country. Most fishers are in municipal fisheries, which grew by only 2.5 percent. Municipal fishers constitute the poorest sector in our society, but despite their big number, they have gotten very little attention. (See Table 5) 

TABLE 5: Growth in fisheries

SUB-SECTOR % OF FISHERS

FISHERS GROWTH RATE

Municipal 89 89,000 2.5%

Commercial 7 70,000 2.1%

Aquaculture 4 40,000 28.4%

TOTAL 100% 1 million 12.2% (AVERAGE)

The good news is that the DA has heeded a suggestion from the Kilusang Mangingisda and has committed to formulate and implement the first fisheries master plan later this year. This will give municipal fishers a large part of DA resources and attention. But more agricultural policies and programs with a pro-poor bias should be implemented if poverty and hunger are to be addressed successfully. 

As for inflation, a key component affecting its rise is the huge fiscal deficit. Lost revenues due to smuggling are estimated to be at least P80 billion annually. Political will to curb both outright and technical smuggling will go a long way in shrinking the fiscal deficit, providing a better environment for job creation, and curbing inflation. 

At some point, however, the public needs to step in. The Alyansa Agrikultura, the largest farmer-fisherfolk coalition in the country, considers nothing less than good governance as the real solution to solving hunger. But crucial to this governance is private sector participation through the invigoration of the legally mandated agriculture and fisheries councils at the national and local levels. These councils would not only act as monitors against graft, corruption, and government abuse. They would also be able to recommend solutions and participate in the implementation of policies and programs that will address the three areas that most affect our hunger situation today: food production, supply chain management, and most importantly, the affordability of food through more employment and less inflation.

Ernesto M. Ordoñez chairs Agriwatch, a private sector initiative. He was a former undersecretary of agriculture and trade and industry, and former chair and Cabinet secretary for Presidential Flagship Programs and Projects. He is currently the national coordinator of the Alyansa Agrikultura.

http://pcij.org/i-report/1/hungry.html

by Sheila S. Coronel

Everyday, hundreds of hungry and homeless queue for rice porridge at the Quiapo church. [photos by Jose Enrique Soriano]

TO MAKE lugaw or rice porridge for 200, Diding, the volunteer cook at the feeding center of the Basilica of the Black Nazarene in Quiapo, in the noisy, throbbing heart of the old Manila, begins by heating water in two giant, iron pots, each about three feet deep. When the water is in a roiling boil, she pours in the juice made from one kilo of ginger (the ginger is first peeled, then grated, before being wrapped in cheesecloth and squeezed of its liquid). After that, a handful of salt is thrown in. Only then is the main ingredient added: three-and-a-half kilos each of plain milled rice and malagkit (sticky rice).

For nearly three hours, Diding and her two male assistants hover around the hot stoves, stirring the porridge so that the rice is evenly cooked and doesn't stick to the bottom of the pots. When the grains are soft, several handfuls of kasubha (dried safflower petals, the poor man's version of saffron) are thrown into the pots, followed by a few hundred grams of powdered chicken flavoring. The rice is kept at a boil until it is fluffy. More water is then poured in, the stirring continues, and after a while, the grains are floating enticingly in the thick, yellow soup garnished with saffron threads.

Three times a day, a few minutes before 6 a.m, 12 noon, and 6 p.m., the pots are loaded onto a cart and brought just outside the tall, iron gates that seal off the Plaza Miranda entrance of the church. Promptly at the stroke of the hour, as the pealing of the bells of the grand Quiapo basilica rises above the din of the city's traffic, Diding and her assistants start ladling out the porridge into plastic cups. By then a queue of hungry and homeless people are already lined up. More than 200 people are fed each time, although the numbers can swell to 400 at night. Some wait at the plaza for over an hour. For many, Diding's lugaw will be their first — and last — meal of the day.

The first sip of the porridge, taken on an empty stomach, scalds the tongue, with the warmth slithering down the throat before settling in the belly. The rice grains are fat and tender; cooked for hours in a mix of flavors, they are tasty as well. The chicken flavoring probably has more MSG than real chicken in it, but its saltiness tickles the taste buds. Many queue for a second round, and if there is enough left in the pot, even for a third.

For Christian Alvarez, aged five, who lives on the plaza, near the Mercury drug store, with his parents and two other siblings, the lugaw is a staple. Friendly and frisky, with a mop of peroxided hair, Christian is at the feeding center with his entire family three times a day. Today, after the noon feeding, he will share with his parents and siblings, as well as Mark Anthony Gañedo, a nine-year-old runaway from Bulacan who considers the Alvarezes his adopted family, their only real meal of the day: three cups of rice bought for P5 each and a vegetable dish sold for P10 at the Quiapo market.

Today is a bad day, says Rowena Alvarez, Christian's mother, one of the many herb and potion sellers for which Quiapo is famous. Not many people buy her wares during the Christmas holidays. Her husband Lawrence, who peddles cigarettes and candies, isn't doing brisk business either. So tonight, as in previous nights, Rowena and Lawrence and their three boys will go without supper. They will sleep on milk cartons laid out on the plaza, saved from gnawing hunger by Diding's lugaw.

Lawrence will think of his favorite food — tinola and fried chicken — and try as he might, he will not remember when he tasted them last. Rowena will remember her other children — two who are staying with relatives elsewhere in the city, one who was adopted by a friend, another who was sent to an orphanage, and the girl, then aged two, who suddenly disappeared on the plaza one night six years ago when Lawrence left her for just five minutes to fetch water from Jollibee. She will wonder whether they have eaten tonight and what they will have for breakfast tomorrow.

EVEN BEFORE day breaks, Plaza Miranda is already astir. The herb sellers are setting up their stalls, displaying

assorted elixirs, love potions, charms to ward off evil and beguile lovers, and an abortion-inducing concoction euphemistically called pamparegla or period inducer. The candle peddlers are unpacking long, thin candlesticks of different colors, for the Quiapo devotees' every possible need: white for birthdays, red for good health, green for money, peach for studies, orange for career, pink for love, blue for peace of mind.

By 5:45, as the first light of day shines on the plaza and all the poor souls who sleep there, a plump middle-aged City Hall employee carrying a stick starts waking everyone up and shooing them away. The street sweepers are soon unleashed. A new day is beginning and the night-time residents for whom Plaza Miranda is a place to sleep must give way to those who have other uses for it during the day.

Evelyn Tedranes has been at the plaza since 5 a.m. With her husband and nine-month-old son Jonas, she sleeps beneath the eaves of a building fronting the San Sebastian Cathedral, about two kilometers away. By 4 a.m., the guards there drive all the homeless people out of the pavements, in preparation for the daytime commerce that takes place on the street, so Evelyn, with Jonas in one arm and a bag containing all her family's possessions in the other, walks to Quiapo church to wait for the feeding center to open at 6. Her husband follows behind, dragging with him a big plastic bag of recyclable — and saleable — stuff.

The couple has been living on the streets for years, Evelyn, for more than two decades since running away from home in Concepcion, Tarlac at the age of 12. They collect used cans and bottles and sell these to scrap dealers in Divisoria for P30 a kilo. They also act as middlemen, buying the refuse collected by the other homeless people in the area, a business they started with P100 given by someone they had met on the streets. Today they roll over P150 as capital to buy the scrap and then resell these to other merchants. They make about P50 daily, which they use to buy food, coffee, soap (for bathing in public toilets), some clothes, and for Jonas, disposable diapers, as it is difficult to wash and dry nappies if you live on the streets.

When she can afford it, Evelyn buys a sachet of instant coffee for P2, to help her and her husband start the day. They have only one real meal daily — sometimes tinned sardines, tuyo or Dipsy pork crackling — eaten with rice. To stave off hunger, they line up for lugaw at the church three times a day. The day before, all they had apart from lugaw was a cup of rice bought for P5; a plate of pancit (noodles), also costing P5; and soup from dinuguan, which came gratis from the food vendor. The week before, some do-gooders driven by the Christmas spirit had given the homeless families on Evelyn's street a kilo of rice and some eggs each. So supper for them that week was rice and hard-boiled eggs cooked in a can on the sidewalk, with scrap wood collected from a construction site nearby. "Hindi ka matitinga (That's not even enough food to choke on)," Evelyn says, wryly.

For Evelyn, everyday is like camping as she forages for food and scrap in the concrete warren of Quiapo. She shrugs it all off, even the regular anti-vagrancy drives, usually when there is a major event and the city gets itself ready for a public preening. The last time this happened was National Heroes' Day on November 30, when she and other homeless people were forcibly hauled off the streets by the police and kept a couple of days in a building near City Hall. They were fed what looked — and tasted — like pig slops and then released.

Once, Evelyn joined a rally because she was promised payment by the rent-a-crowd entrepreneurs who regularly come to Quiapo to recruit. "I was pregnant then," she recalls "But they gave me P50 and free food. When we were near UN Avenue, I got hit in the ass by a policeman."

She can laugh about it now. "I didn't even know what the rally was about."

The streets harden you, she says, and after a while, you can laugh at anything, including the time she was walking around the city dazed. Her first husband had left her, taking all their children with him. She searched everywhere but could not find them. She says she must have had a nervous breakdown, because after that she found herself at the mental hospital, in a roomful of really crazy people. She spent three months there before she convinced them she was sane and they finally released her.

It is really not so bad on the streets, she says. On December 21, the Quiapo church held a Christmas party, giving away to each of the homeless persons there one kilo of rice, two packets of Lucky Me noodles, and two tins of sardines. They were also fed adobo and pancit. On the 26th, there was another party, this time at the Paco church and they were given soap, toothbrushes, and toothpaste and fed chop suey, fried chicken, and more pancit.

There is always the seasonal kindness of strangers who, the rest of the year pay little heed to people like her. "Yagit" is how Evelyn refers to her kind — society's refuse, scrap, unwanted litter.

"Ikaw ma'am," she asks, "anong pamasko mo sa akin (And you, ma'am, what is your Christmas present for me)?"

FREDDIE FRILLARTE, the kindly, soft-spoken volunteer who runs the feeding center at the church, knows that the soup kitchen may breed dependency and mendicancy among those it seeks to help. But he has seen real changes, especially among the children, who he says are now livelier, cleaner, and more respectful. Many, he says, are off rugby, as they no longer need to sniff the glue to take their minds off hunger. They are also more energetic, no longer sleeping on the plaza all the time.

Freddie is a retired balikbayan who lived in the U.S. for many years and a devotee of the Divine Mercy, started by Sister Faustina Kowalska, now an ordained saint, who claimed Jesus Christ appeared to her in Krakow, Poland in 1931. The spiritual director of the Divine Mercy Apostolate in the Philippines is Monsignor Josefino Ramirez, the parish priest of Quiapo, and it was his idea to set up the feeding program here, after a similarly successful program he ran when he still headed the Binondo parish.

When Freddie opened the soup kitchen at the Quiapo church on June 17 last year, the Divine Mercy Apostolate had enough money to last only three days. "We didn't know

where the money for the fourth day would come from," he says. "But one of our members from Alabang pitched in. Then there were more donations. We sent solicitation letters to balikabayan from Las Vegas and they raised more than $1,000. Many come here to help. Some students from La Salle or Ateneo come and say, here's P2,000 or P3,000, I'm giving it to you instead of holding a birthday party. One Chinese guy saw the feeding and he came back with a truckload of rice. One guy comes here every week to give P100. Others give eggs or pan de sal."

Tonight, in fact, each cup of porridge will have half an egg, courtesy of an anonymous donor. At noon, there was bottled water for everyone. Freddie sees it all as a sign not just of human compassion but of God's grace.

"Usually the people who come here are victims of injustice of all kinds — those abandoned by spouses or beaten up by family members, some lost homes in a fire, others were fired from their jobs, there are beggars, those gypped by recruiters and have no money for the fare back home. Some come here and would disappear for months because they had been recruited to work in the

Millions of Filipinos are going hungry, like Evelyn Tedranes and son Jonas who live on the streets of Manila.

salt farms in Bulacan, the farms in Nueva Ecija, or to clean the ships in Batangas. They accept any work. There are lots of gay men here, too. Sometimes, they're here the whole week, and then they disappear, and come back again. One bakla was here, he said his father was in the army and drove him out of the house, so he came here to eat." But Freddie admits there are snatchers and petty thieves among those who eat here, too, as well as addicts and conmen. The plaza, he says, abounds with all sorts of criminal types who take advantage of the clueless and the homeless.

It is close to twilight now, and the clients of the Divine Mercy soup kitchen are gathering at the plaza. There is Jennifer, 23, who ran away from an abusive husband in Quezon City, with her one-year-old son Joshua. Until today, she had lived in a kariton (wooden cart) near the St. Luke's Hospital, collecting and selling garbage. She doesn't know where she will go now, but at least she and her son will have something to eat in Quiapo.

Then there's Jun-Jun Alcantara, 30. He wears lipstick and it looks like his hair has been blow-dried. He left home in Quezon because his mother remarried when he was 10 and he felt unwanted. He has lived off the streets since then. He eventually found work doing manicures at a beauty parlor, but when the salon closed, he was back on the streets, giving manicures to peddlers and passersby for P20 each. One day, he fell asleep on the plaza and someone stole his manicure set, so now he collects recyclable cans and bottles instead.

Jun-Jun is a regular at the Quiapo feeding center, but he hangs out mainly at Rizal Park, where he also sleeps. Tonight, after the lugaw here, he will walk with the other gay yagit to the Sikh Temple on UN Avenue, where the priests also give free food — usually spicy beans and yellow rice. Sundays, Jun-Jun and his friends are at the Paco church, where they serve rice and "tunay na ulam" (real food). Thursdays, there are feedings at the Ho Tiek Buddhist temple in Binondo. The food there is vegetarian, but Jun-Jun goes there, too, as well as to Plaza Lawton where, on Friday nights, some charismatics serve noodle soup.

"You have to be patient, map out your own route," says Jun-Jun. "Mine is Quiapo, Binondo, Luneta, Sta. Cruz. Sometimes I buy my own food, like pinakbet (vegetable stew) or monggo (mung bean soup). I can afford a real meal only on Saturdays and Sundays. I buy adobo (pork stew) for P25 or P30. I eat just a little each time so it will last till evening."

There are plenty more here at the plaza, waiting to be fed. Nearly all of them carry bags that contain all they own in the world. Some ask for help or money, but all are eager to tell their story to anyone who will listen. There's Mary Ann del Rosario, 34, who works everyday from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m., calling passengers to waiting jeepneys. She makes P2 for every jeepney that's filled up. There's the talkative Mac-mac, who is only 12, but who comes to the church regularly to eat, so that his mother and three younger siblings can have more of the meager food the family can afford to buy. And then there's Reynaldo Arriola, 37, who left Isabela after a quarrel with his siblings and has been in Manila for two years, scraping a living selling cigarettes, until a thief ran away with the wooden box containing his wares and all his money.

Quiapo has always been a lost-and-found place. Not too long ago, says Freddie, a four-year old girl was abandoned at the plaza, apparently left to fend for herself with only a bag containing her clothes and toys. One of the sidewalk peddlers found her and took her in his care. Freddie himself came here in search of something he had lost, perhaps his own vision of Divine Mercy.

Those who come to Quiapo seek refuge from hunger and other woes.

Somewhere, among all these lost and abandoned souls, he has found, if not that, at least something bigger than himself.

It is 6:45. Darkness has set in. The hundreds of hungry have been fed, and they start walking away from the church, disappearing into the shadows with their stories and their secrets. The lugaw cart, its the pots now empty, is rolled back inside the gates. Tomorrow, another day — and another round of feeding — begins.

http://pcij.org/i-report/1/soup-kitchen.html

by Nancy Reyes Lumen

NEXT TO rice, pancit is the perennial item on the Filipino dining table. Even to a Westerner, Filipino cuisine means: 1. adobo; 2. lumpiang shanghai; and 3. pancit luglog. Such is the impact of pancit in our culinary profile.

The convenience and simplicity of this starchy food is the key to its popularity in this country — more so now, with the younger set hooked on noodles in all shapes and forms.

Pancit, borrowed from the Chinese, then innovated and adopted into our cuisine, connects us to our Asian roots. But more importantly, it is a veritable Pinoy comfort food — easier to cook than rice, and more versatile and food combination-friendly. It is the faster fast food. In fact, “pancit” is derived from the Hokkien “pian i sit,” which means “something conveniently cooked fast.”

The first pancit that landed in the Philippines is likely to have been made from wheat noodles brought as baon by a Chinese trader. Sometime later, another Chinese merchant probably tried his hand on making his own noodles when his baon ran out. With usisero (inquisitive) natives by his side, he may have experimented with batch after batch until he produced something that looked like what he may have had in his homeland. But since rice, not wheat, was on hand, he made rice noodles. Rice starch differs in nature from wheat, having less gluten that provides that familiar “bite.” Rice noodles are whiter in color and have less “muscle” in body. But that may not have mattered much to the homesick Chinese trader; pancit was pancit, and anyway rice noodles could be had in China as well.

Filipino pancit varieties

The Chinese also taught us that if you wish to go through many decades, then you should eat birthday noodles instead of cake. Noodles represent long life and good health; they must not be cut short so as not to corrupt the symbolism. In lieu of candles, the stir-fried miswa noodles or thin canton noodles would be topped with red- or orange-tinted quail eggs; sweet, golden, fried shallot slivers; and green onion leaves.

Even “everyday” noodles are eaten with that hidden desire to have a healthy life. But that will hardly happen if you eat “yagit pancit,” or a starch-on-starch combination that will also make you lose the fight against weight gain. Yagit pancit is pancit stuffed in pan de sal, pancit sandwiched between slices of white bread, pancit and rice. Yes, we are talking pancit ulam. No long-life noodles here—there are not enough nutrients in noodles to subsist on them alone or combined with more starch.

But here we are with a younger generation gone gaga over instant noodles, which have invaded every grocery, convenience store, and call center in the country. In some ways, it really is the ultimate convenience food. Even if one does not have hot water to cook it, the crispy noodles can become a snack by themselves. Time for a confession: I have indulged in this convenience myself, when faced with serious deadlines, eating the uncooked noodles as if they were shing-aling without the spice. Instant noodles are pre-cooked, after all, deep-fried into their crispy incarnation before being packed. I remember reading somewhere that high-temperature frying of noodles somehow turned it carcinogenic, but since that hasn’t been fully explained to me yet, any fear I may have of a deadly noodle remains on hold.

Still, there is nothing like the real thing — and we have so many of it, too! Because the Chinese merchant’s rice noodles or bihon are easily breakable, a variety with egg was added down the line. Rice noodles with eggs are usually considered as — surprise! — “egg noodles.” If mongo-bean starch is used, sotanghon (glass noodles or vermicelli) is produced.

Credit soy sauce for ensuring the presence of pancit in Philippine home cooking. Soy sauce or toyo’s nutty, delicate flavor complements the linear taste of rice noodles. Sautéed in toyo and broth, the bihon also turns golden brown, making it look all the more appetizing and “saraaaap (delicious)” by Pinoy standards.

There’s also the hodge-podge of chopped ingredients, sautéed with the seasonings, that give a pancit dish more layers of taste: finely sliced veggies (like onions, cabbage, green beans, young corn, bell pepper, etc.); finely sliced meats (pork, chicken breast, chicken giblets, pork liver, etc.) and seafood and greens (fresh shrimp, oysters, squid, with wansoy or cilantro, kinchay or Chinese celery, onion leaves, and much more.) All these rich ingredients beef up a pancit and give it its distinct character. The more toppings, the better. The more costly the toppings, the better. The toppings are also clues to a pancit’s “hometown,” which will certainly have its trademark produce — oysters and shrimps for a coastal town, for example, and pork crackling for hog-growing areas — dressing up the noodles.

But while there are many kinds of pancit, it comes in only two forms: dry or with soup. Pancit guisado falls under the dry

form, although broth is involved in making it. Aside from broth, rice starch, soy sauce, and then the toppings or sahog complete the pancit guisado recipe. The broth for sautéing the noodles in can be either soy sauce-ginger based or shrimp liqueur-based. But sometimes, the bored cook combines these concoctions. Another kind of “dry” pancit comes with sauce, like pancit Malabon.

Noodles with soup include pancit mami, pancit molo, and the Ilonggo’s pride, batchoy. Usually the broth is chicken-based. The hearty noodle soup often comes with sahog like slices of chicken or beef, a sprinkling of chopped spring onions and chicharon, and bits of toasted garlic.

But there is still so much that can be done with pancit. How about a super-fiber pancit made with rice bran or darak? Or gata (coconut) sauce for pancit instead of using heavy cream? Anyone for pancit sampler plates or an all-pancit buffet?

There is, though, one more kind of pancit: it comes in a brown bag borne home by husband for the wife each time he reaches the bedroom behind schedule for reasons less than saintly. It is a miracle pancit and has saved lives, sustained domestic peace, and kept the noise down. It’s a wonder no one has made millions yet out of Peace Pancit!

A PANCIT CHART

Here’s a closer look at different types and styles of pancit and a regional map of pancit specialties:

Noodles by how they are cooked:

sautéed or “dry” — pancit guisado, pancit canton soupy or “wet” (with broth) — mami, pancit molo,

batchoy deep-fried-noodle basket — pancit canton (another

version) a la luglog — dipped first in boiling broth to soften

dried noodles double cooked — fried-steamed or fried-boiled, etc. (This is the latest style of cooking

noodles.)

Noodles by thickness:

medium to fat noodles (like the Japanese udon) — miki, mami, canton, lomi, pang-original Pancit Malabon or Luglog, North Park Noodles, pancit buko (which is actually not real pancit as it is made with coconut meat)

thin to fine noodles — miswa, bihon, sotanghon, efuven (flat and thin, like linguini) flat noodles like pancit molo

Noodles by make:

with wheat flour with wheat flour and egg with buckwheat with mongo bean starch with or without egg with flour and kalabasa (squash) mash (also ube, saluyot, etc.)

NOODLES BY REGION

Pancit Habhab (Lucena, Quezon) — sautéed miki noodles served in a cone and eaten sans utensils. It takes practice sucking the noodles without them ending up all over your face or your shirt, but it’s fun!

Dinuguan on pancit (somewhere in Bicol) — just imagining this can make you almost taste it, doesn’t it? Yum.

Pancit Molo (Iloilo and Bacolod, Negros) — clear chicken broth with wontons (considered pancit because of their wrappers), lots of garlic, and crushed chorizo.

La Paz Batchoy (Iloilo) — soup with thin mami noodles and topped with lots of chopped innards, garlic, and egg. It is the perfect hangover kicker of all time. The secret ingredient in the broth is guinamos or Visayan bagoong (fish paste), which gives the dish a sweet-salty-brine note.

Pancit Luglog (all over the country) — Made distinct by its orange shrimp-achuete sauce enriched with toppings of chicharon (pork cracklings), tinapa (smoked fish), kamias, wansoy, shrimp, etc. Many regions have adapted this style of cooking pancit, although they vary in the kinds of noodles that they use. Some of the popular pancit luglog are from Pampanga and Tagalog regions.

The way pancit luglog was made in my grandparents’ restaurant, the Aristocrat, in the 1950s was to pound the heads of hundreds of shrimps to make the richly flavored base for the sauce. Then the sauce was thickened—not with flour, never, never!—with beaten duck egg. The now sunset-colored sauce was intensified with achuete oil. Tinapa, chicharon, green onion leaves, garlic, and shrimp and sliced duck eggs made the pancit’s crowning glory. It was like eating spoonfuls of thick, milky, nutty butter, with flavors from the sea and freshened by the onion leaves. Dining on pancit luglog has never felt as decadent since.

Pancit Malabon (originally from Malabon) — It uses fat rice noodles that are first niluluglog. The noodles are tossed in a rich shrimp-achuete oil and topped with the freshest, fattest newly shelled oysters, squid rings, suaje or hipong puti (sweet-tasting shrimps) just out of the water, and wansoy leaves. Rosie’s Pancit Malabon is still legend!

Pancit Puti (Manila and other gaya-gaya places) — This pancit relies solely on the flavor of a good, hearty broth. Toppings are minimal. Some like this pancit, some don’t.

Pancit Canton (everywhere) — Probably one of the most popular pancits, this is a kind of pancit guisado with ginger-soy sauce flavor base. By habit, there is always a sawsawan of calamansi and more soy sauce on the side. Toppings vary, depending on the price. A de luxe pancit canton would include a piece of squid with fancy diamond-shaped cuts across it, several bola-bola, and a whole slew of chop suey on top.

Lomi (Batangas) — This delicious, al dente kind of egg noodle is usually strongly spiced with pepper. Lomi is popular in Southern Tagalog and has also made a mark in Chinese fast food. Lomi gets better as the ingredients become more expensive: from plain fish balls (cut into thin slices) to crab meat, shrimp balls, green peas—the works!

Pancit Sotanghon (Tagalog-style) — A “rich” dish starting from the noodle used: sotanghon, which is more expensive than egg noodles. The way my grandmother Aling Asiang prepared her superb, classic, Pancit Malabon is now a lost art. Hear ye: sotanghon noodles are kept in cold water till ready to be sautéed in hot achuete oil flavored with plenty of young garlic fried in it. Toppings would be flaked chicken breast, handfuls of golden fried garlic (which flavored the oil), and lots of freshly ground black peppercorn; boiled duck egg—its yolks pressed through a sieve, and the same with the egg whites. Only Navotas or Malabon patis was allowed to season it, along with calamansi. Wansoy provided the coup de grace.

Pancit ng Bataan — This is pancit palabok with tons of tinapa, because tinapa is one of the best products of Bataan (according to Luchi Roman Reyes of that region’s famous Roman clan).

Buddy’s Pancit-style ( from the BLTB region) — Pancit guisado with sayote strips.

Pancit Musiko/ Pancit Vigan (Ilocos Region) — A soupy kind of miki dish meant as merienda (so I guess this would be like a mami soup). The miki noodles are made in Batac. It was christened pancit musiko because after the town fiesta procession, this was the dish given free to the musicians.

Efuven Pancit Guisado (Iloilo and Bacolod, Negros) — Flat and thin noodles that got baptized with the name of the noodle maker.

Pancit Marilao (Bulacan) — Luglog with crumbled day-old ukoy as added topping. Pancit Langlang (Tagalog region) — A vegetable-topped pancit, much like a laksa, the

mixed vegetables dish popular in the same region. This is a very wet pancit or a soupy pancit served in a shallow bowl.

http://pcij.org/i-report/1/pancit.html

Trivializing hungerPosted by: Alecks P. Pabico on 23 March 2007 at 11:58 pm

THE recent Social Weather Stations survey showing a record-high 19-percent hunger incidence among Filipinos has elicited yet another callous response from Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who said that she too had experienced going hungry once.

“Even I have missed one meal in the last three months,” quipped Arroyo in an obvious dig at the question used by the SWS to solicit responses from survey respondents about going hungry or missing a meal in the last three months.

The polling firm’s use of the phrase “nakaranas ng gutom at walang makain” (experienced hunger and did not have anything to eat) in its survey question specifically refers to hunger that is involuntarily suffered by households.

But Arroyo would rather take it literally. And in doing so, she has only succeeded in trivializing the serious problem of hunger, if not making a mockery of the ordeal of an estimated 3.4 million hungry Filipino families nationwide.

Because missing a meal in the last three months is a matter of choice for Arroyo while the same cannot be said of the nearly one in five households that continue to endure hunger simply because they don’t have any choice at all — or much more enjoy privileged access to the presidential banquet.

Arroyo would later grant that insufficient income could be contributing to Filipinos’ hungry stomachs. Well, it should given that the combined rate of unemployment (7.8 percent) and underemployment (21.5 percent) at 29.3 percent has hardly eased since 2004, when it was at 29.4 percent, which as Elmer Ordoñez wrote in i Report in 2005 was “the worst in the last four years.”

Said the former undersecretary of agriculture and trade and industry: “With less income from employment, people would obviously have less money to buy food. Let’s not even go to where they are getting the money they are spending.”

And to think that inflation has eased at 3.2 percent to date — the lowest since December 2002 at 2.5 percent — from an average of 6.2 percent last year.

What is making matters worse, Ordoñez argued is the inequitable growth in the country where about half of the national income goes to only 20 percent of our population. In contrast, he said, citing an Asian Development Bank study, that the poorest 20 percent of the population improved their income by only 0.5 percent for every one-percent growth in average income. This over the period from 1985 to 1997 when the poverty incidence dropped from 44 percent to 33 percent.

Still, Arroyo would rather place the blame elsewhere, repeating her earlier refrain in reaction to the SWS hunger survey that the people should also be partly faulted for their poor spending habits that prioritize luxuries (including vices) over basic necessities.

Arroyo’s assertions, however, do not have the backing of government’s very own data. The latest Family Income and Expenditure Statistics (FIES) survey, which was conducted by the National Statistics Office in 2003, found that Filipinos spent only an average of 1.1 percent for cigarettes and 0.7 percent for alcohol, compared to 43 percent for food out of their total income. These figures, in fact, have not changed since the last survey that was done in 2000. (see table below)

PERCENTAGE DISTRIBUTION OF TOTAL FAMILY EXPENDITURES2000 and 2003

EXPENDITURE GROUP 2000 (%) 2003 (%)

FoodFood consumed at home> Cereals and cereals preparations> Roots and tubers> Fruits and vegetables> Meat and meat preparations> Dairy products and eggs> Fish and marine products> Coffee, cocoa and tea> Non-alcoholic beverages> Food not elsewhere classifiedFood regularly consumed outside the home

43.638.611.90.64.47.03.05.71.01.43.65.0

42.837.511.00.64.36.73.25.51.01.53.85.3

Alcoholic beverages 0.7 0.7

Tobacco 1.1 1.1

Fuel, light and water 6.3 6.5

Transportation and communication 6.8 7.4

Household operations 2.3 2.2

Personal care and effects 3.6 3.9

Clothing, footwear and other wear 2.7 2.9

Education 4.2 4.0

Recreation 0.5 0.5

Medical care 1.9 2.2

Non-durable furnishings 0.2 0.2

Durable furniture and equipment 2.5 2.7

Rent/rental value of dwelling unit 14.3 13.3

House maintenance and minor repairs 0.9 0.7

Taxes paid 2.2 2.2

Miscellaneous expenditures> special occasions of the family> gifts and contributions to others

3.32.40.9

3.72.51.2

Other expenditures 2.9 2.9

Total Family Expenditures (P1,000) 1,791,132,882 2,023,353,939

True, there is a continuing slide in the share of family expenditure on food items, which the FIES survey noted as an indication that the spending pattern of Filipino families may be tending towards less spending on food. The slight decline (0.8 percent) in family spending on food items also showed an increase in expenses on food consumed outside the home compared to food consumed at home.

On the other hand, increased spending were monitored on transportation and communication as well as in fuel, light and water, personal care and effects, clothing, footwear and other wear, medical care, durable furniture and equipment and miscellaneous expenditures such as those for special family occasions and gifts and contributions.

But these expenditure items are not commonly what the poor will spend their income on. That is why groups like the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) Philippines

rush to defend them, saying that what Arroyo calls as luxuries are in fact “small dignities, the poor’s mechanism to escape the harsh realities of poverty.”

http://www.pcij.org/blog/?p=1562