This week we’re looking at an unpleasant topic that isn’t so much about our own personal experiences as it is just a reality check on the place we call our (temporary) home.
We would be shocked if any of you have heard of pagpag; we certainly had not until we moved here to Manila.
As we have mentioned before, the Philippines is very much a country of “the haves and the have nots.” The divide between is a nearly unbridgeable chasm. There’s a furniture store down the street that sells couches that cost $12,000, more than five years of wages for a Filipino earning minimum wage.
For those who have, life can be quite comfortable, even luxurious (which is why so many people from other neighboring countries have been flocking to Manila for the last few years; their money goes verrrrrrrrry far here) but for those who have not, daily life is a struggle.
Yet it’s a struggle they endure with genuine, not fake/plastered on smiles. One of our favorite condo employees—one of the elevator button pushers—is named Gezel, but we privately call him Smiley. That nickname would apply to almost everyone we encounter, no matter how hard their real lives may be.
And they are hard, as we’ve written before.
Basic Filipino food is relatively inexpensive, and for about 100 pisos (about $2.00) it’s possible to put enough food in the stomach each day to survive.
For those who can’t afford even that much, there’s pagpag.
The word pagpag in the Tagalog language means "to shake off the dust or dirt.” But it’s much more upsetting than that.
Pagpag is recycled leftover food scraps collected from the trash. It can also included expired frozen meat, fish, or vegetables discarded by supermarkets and scavenged in garbage trucks where this expired food is collected.
Some will eat the pagpag immediately after it is found or cook it first, such as by boiling or re-frying the leftovers in oil. Some individuals scavenge the food themselves – the dumpsters of KFC and Jollibee are a treasure chest for leftover chicken pieces to turn into pagpag. Others scavenge the leftover food from dumpsters, re-fry the pieces (or not), and sell the found pagpag for 20 pisos (35 cents) as a source of income.
The entire idea of our fellow humans eating garbage food harvested from a container that’s been sitting in 95+ degree heat is difficult to think about, to say the very least that can be said.
Video link here. It’s 20+ minutes but worth your time.