Taking food for granted

Rhona Canoy .

SO… In the past few months, my dad’s Perspective radio program has become part of my resident duties, placing me in a constant learning mode. It’s been amazing and gratifying to find myself absorbing things which heretofore I’ve had very little (if any) knowledge about. But my peculiar point of view is skewing his radio program a bit off kilter.

I’ve been doing a series on food security and what I’m learning is further strengthening my belief that we Pinoys really do need a big re-adjustment in our priority filter. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have gotten derailed when it comes to figuring out what is important in our lives. Our attitude towards food and its importance to all of us is a wonderful case in point.

We seem to have forgotten that food is a necessity. It is not a luxury. We all need to eat in order to live. In spite of all the fancy shmancy keto diets, intermittent fasting, calorie deprivation things that we do in order to lose weight, we haven’t yet found a way to live without food. How many of us are aware that food is considered a basic human right, according to the international Bill of Human Rights? I bet you didn’t know that. I sure didn’t. But when we talk of human rights violations, the best we can come up with is extra-judicial killings, which haven’t killed off as many people as starvation has.

I’m not saying we should disregard the issue of EJKs. I’m just saying that the issue of food as a basic human right has affected more humans than anything else. Let’s not forget that just because we eat, it doesn’t mean that we are eating well as far as nutrition goes. The numbers for malnutrition in our country is already quite high as it is. Especially in our poorer communities, children are suffering from lack of nutrition. The only food available for them certainly does not serve the bodily needs for healthy living. But cheap food is sadly not nutritious food.

The irony of it all is that even kids from well-to-do families are not healthy, from a nutrition standpoint. I don’t know if anybody has really done a comprehensive study on children’s diabetes. But surely the numbers must also be high. Our kids don’t eat vegetables or fresh fruits. They are fast-food junkies. Feeding on McDonald’s, Jollibee, Burger King, and whatever cheaper alternatives there may be. Our kids drink soft drinks and sugar-loaded “fruit” drinks more than water. Yeah, they’ll drink milk at breakfast, served up by ill-informed parents who don’t read the labels. Milk in the Philippines is loaded with sugar. Check out the nutrition list at the back.

Here’s where it gets upsetting for me. We don’t want to pay good money for good food. When we go to the market, we will haggle with the vendors for lower prices. We complain when rice hits 50+ pesos per kilo. We get upset when tomatoes are 80 pesos per kilo. But we will pay 200 pesos for an overpriced garden salad buffet, fooling our pretentious selves that it is money well-spent for eating healthy. We should be paying more for our food because we can’t live without it. But no.

Our cars cost over a million pesos (I don’t want to think about how much monthly payments are on that). Our clothes and shoes certainly are up in the thousands. And let’s not even talk about women’s handbags. The price of those things is a travesty. And yet the same unthinking woman will pay for a 70 thousand peso handbag, but haggle with the vegetable vendor over cabbage which costs 50 pesos a kilo.

The hardships which our farmers and our fisherfolk endure just to bring produce to our table is difficult to imagine. They are also taken advantage of by greedy middlemen who will undercut their prices, and sell them to a market that will give them a fat profit margin. Add to that the lack of government support and infrastructure to help our food producers, and we are headed for food deprivation before too long.

So what really is important to us? I just can’t figure it out. The renegade in me wants to convince our public market vendors to go on strike for a week. Seven whole days. No fresh produce in our market stalls. Let’s see how long we all will last then. And those vendors are going to be the ones who won’t go hungry over those seven days. Strike. To make a very important point. I wish I could suggest to our local government to establish a rule that public market prices are fixed, just like grocery store prices are. In the spirit of fairness, and in support of our food suppliers.

Do me a favor. Next time you go to the market, after you’ve haggled for a much lower price than what the vendor asked, figure out the value of the few pesos that you saved by bargaining against the thousands-of-pesos value of your wallet, handbag, shoes and clothes. Then ask yourself if those things will keep your stomach from rumbling when there’s no food to be had.