BY LUY
Have you ever been to a restaurant, over ordered and wasted food? Where do you think this food goes? To the junk, if you guessed it from the title of the article.
Pagpag is a Filipino term literally meaning, “to shake of the dirt” and it refers to meat scavenged from garbage and dumpsters, which is then washed, cooked and sold to poor communities in Manila, Phillipines.
Restaurant chains and supermarkets in Manila discard their leftover food and expired meat respectively at dumping sites. There poor Filipino scavengers and ragpickers look for these leftovers and collect them, filling them into bags. These bags are sold for $0.20-0.30 each in the poverty stricken communities of Manila, where people owning small restaurants/ stalls buy these leftovers.
The restaurant owners do the magic of transforming this “junk” into “food”, they clean the pieces of meat with water, separate bones and other dirt. The pieces of meat are then cooked in a gravy, spices are added and the final dish is served with rice. Each portion of Pagpag sells for around $0.50-0.60 and is consumed by the low income groups living in these neighbourhoods. Some of these people are forced to eat pagpag because of their abject poverty while others enjoy pagpag as a fulfilling meal. These restaurant owners earn a handsome profit out of selling pagpag along with the scavengers who collect it from dumps.
This pagpag trade is fraught with health risks, food borne illnesses such as Hepatitis, typhoid, diarrhea, and cholera are common in these people. Consumption of Pagpag has been linked to the food crisis of 2008 and the ubiquitous poverty in Phillipines. Although trends show that people in Phillipines are being lifted from poverty it is sad that there is a huge number of people who are forced to eat off garbage. This situation makes me despondent and I hope we value the food we get readily on our plates each day.
