Philippine Poverty
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Part of YourWorldView's Thought for Food Season, Meal of the Day is a short documentary that tells the story of the people directly involved with the production and consumption of pagpag.
Pagpag is a Filipino term used to describe leftover foods usually from restaurants and household wastes that are thrown away in dumpsites and collected by rubbish scavengers to be recooked and sold to the poorer population. Pagpag has begun to steadily become almost a staple food for the poor despite the health issues that arises through its consumption.
Supported by YourWorldView (http://www.yourworldview.org.uk/)
In Cooperation with Young Focus (http://youngfocus.org)
Directed by Giselle Santos
Poor Filipinos are surviving on this new ‘staple food’—but its ingredients are truly sickening. You may call these leftovers “trash,” but to the impoverished population in the Philippines, these “pagpag” or “recycled food” are their “meal of the day.” It’s sad to say that pagpag is a thriving business in poverty-stricken areas in the Philippines.
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Pagpag, which literally translates to “dusted off food,” are leftovers, typically from fast-food restaurants, scavenged from garbage sites, cleaned and re-cooked as a meal for the poor people.
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These unwanted foods are recycled through boiling or frying, after washing off the dirt and taking out the bones.
The pagpag industry has led people to earn their daily bread through scavenging, processing, and selling this recycled food.
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“A lot of people eat pagpag here,” Salome Degollacion, an elder and resident of Helping Hand, told CNN.
“It’s profitable,” said Dodong Esparagosa, who sells his pagpag in Helping Land, Tondo, one of the poorest slums in Manila. He scavenges and sorts leftovers from heaps of garbage, before selling it.
A bag of pagpag costs around 20P (Philippine Pesos) to P30 ($0.59 to $0.39). To those living hand-to-mouth, they have no other choice and pagpag is better than nothing at all.