MEDIUM RARE

I’m usually cheap to feed – no steak, no lechon for me – but because it was the day before Grandparents’ Day, Cook served me a heavenly serving of salad flavored with cilantro. As I’ve been saying even before the start of what they described as “inflationary prices of food,” what is life without cilantro (pronounced wansoy or wansuy in the palengke).

Cilantro, Cook took care to tell me, was ₱1,200 a kilo, “but I only bought ₱100 worth,” she hastily added, before she’d let indigestion get the better of me.
It didn’t help that she quickly followed her report with this bit: “But tomatoes are ₱200 a kilo and tilapia is ₱120, or ₱60 each.” Can you do a salad without kamatis, huh? At least tilapia is cheaper than galunggong, ₱300, what used to be the poor man’s food. What kind of fish for poor families, then, when canned sardines are no longer as cheap as they used to be?

So I had less than ₱100 worth of salad and a ₱60 tilapia, or ₱160 for lunch. That would be a third of a daily wage earner’s take-home pay. Should I feel guilty? At least I took care to consume only a half cup of rice and some leftover fruit. According to the meditation guru Deepak Chopra, a person needs only enough rice to fill the palm of their hand when it’s in a cup-like position. 

The next day being Grandparents’ Day, my children took me out to lunch. They were kind enough not to show me the bill. Later, the evening meal at home for three came out to be quite expensive for a takeaway from a Taiwanese restaurant — chicken, squid, fried rice — much more than my estimate. Lesson of the day: It’s tricky to guess restaurant prices, even if their ingredients are the same as what housewives buy.

And still we see a lot of food wastage, beginning with water wastage, in restaurants. For a start, it would be nice to know what the Hotel and Restaurant Association has been teaching its members.

How do food prices now affect President BBM’s aspiration for the Philippines to become an upper-middle income country by 2025? Wealthy countries are not exactly healthy countries, either.