Federico Segarra |
Manila (EFE) poorer Manila suburbs in the face of relentlessly rising food prices.
Happyland, a neighborhood where the pagpag is sold
“Everyone here likes my food, I have no complaints,” Evelyn Blasorca, a neighbor of Happyland who has been selling “pagpag” (“shaken” or “recycled” in Tagalog) for years, tells EFE, a recipe that all her customers combine with white rice.
In the neighborhood where he lives, hidden between the docks of the commercial port of Manila, and invisible from the road that borders the polluted coast of the city where it is accessed, some 120,000 people live poorly and sleep tightly canned in fragile shacks.
Ironically, this “city” that stands on mountains of debris is called “Happyland” (happy land, in English).
The intense stench hits the visitor as soon as they enter: under a relentless sun and suffocating humidity, rubbish finds its ideal ecosystem here to impregnate everything with a heavy and penetrating fetid odor that discourages you from continuing to walk.
The narrow streets, mostly less than a meter wide, are home to hundreds of shacks, often lined with discarded containers buried under mud. In them, many of its inhabitants work with garbage: some separating plastics; others, cardboard; and a few recycle metal parts.
Other neighbors, like Roweno Cabuluc, are “pagpag collectors” whose day begins at dawn visiting restaurants and fast food chains that give them the day’s waste in large plastic bags.
Cabuluc returns, already at dawn, to the streets of Happyland, where he rescues the chewed remains of food and bones in a container and separates intact pieces of chicken that some anonymous diner has despised, the most coveted and difficult to find pieces.
After the first round of sorting the meat waste, Cabuluc delivers the recycled food to Evelyn Blasorca, who cleans and boils it, to later prepare two varieties of “pagpag” with it: one meat is refried with flour and the other is marinated. and seasoned with onions, vegetables and spices, which is then accompanied by a sauce.
“In Happyland everyone eats ‘pagpag’, there are places that prepare it better and others worse, but in general everyone likes it,” explains Jay Carriel, a 27-year-old who has been selling plastic for seven years.
Increase the consumption of pagpag
With the inflation unleashed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, now close to 8%, the “pagpag” is increasingly recurrent among the residents of Happyland and those of Tondo, the district that includes Happyland and other shanty towns on the Manila coast , and whose estimated population is around 630,000 people according to the official census.
With the price of onions that reached 700 pesos per kilo (12.70 dollars) in the markets last Christmas, three times more than in rich countries such as Switzerland or Denmark, the sellers of “pagpag” had to figure out how to maintain the prices. portions ranging between 25 and 30 Philippine pesos (0.40 euro cents).
“I am selling more and more ‘pagpag’, I am happy,” says Blasorca, who relates that after the hardest period of the pandemic there were moments of lower sales, but the rise in food prices has once again increased their income, since the people avoid shopping in the market more frequently.
Some “pagpag” collectors, however, feel uncomfortable when asked about the selection process of the meat consumed, since inside the plastic bags that accumulate the waste you can see the logo of the two large fast food chains of the country, who “donate” the waste to these garbage workers.
“They think these restaurants will get mad if they go out in the press as purveyors of chewed meat,” says Jay Rey, a worker at Melissa Pearls, an association that provides free meals for kids and adults in Happyland, often connecting companies that want to advertise food-service events. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with those most in need.
“At least we prepare fresh food, and they don’t eat ‘pagpag’ all day,” says Rey. “But here people are not sick, they have a hard stomach,” he adds. However, the constant consumption of “pagpag” for children can cause poor growth and malnutrition, as well as Hepatitis A, diarrhea and cholera, according to the Commission. Philippine National Anti-Poverty.