Food to share
MEDIUM RARE
Try digesting this.
If you’re earning a minimum daily wage of ₱600 and you have three children to feed, the logic behind the math (or the math behind the logic) is that each child gets ₱200 of food for two meals in one day.
What’s ₱200 in terms of food prices? Based on actual palengke experience and not DTI projections, ₱190 buys two pieces of milkfish (bangus) or a little less than ₱100 for one fish. To go with the fish, rice costs ₱65 a kilo; some veggies and fruits cost a fortune.
Galunggong, once dubbed the poor man’s fish, has gone up in stature. Poor families can no longer afford g-g because four pieces, weighing about a kilo, cost ₱220. In comparison, besugo – like bangus, it’s tricky to eat due to the fine bones hidden within its flesh – costs ₱160 a kilo for four small pieces. Tilapia is now the cheapest at ₱120.
According to data collectors, 18 percent of the population rate themselves as poor. Poor equals hungry, which means they eat less than three meals a day. In our culture, women in the family voluntarily deprive themselves of food or choose to eat less in favor of the men. Deliberately, consciously, mothers and sisters are constrained to consume less, not only because of their size and anatomy, but they have been told – it’s been programmed into their DNA – that men need more and better food as “they work harder and longer outside the home.”
A typical story as told by Marites is that when Mrs. Z discovered that her husband had the means and the cheek to support a mistress, her first reaction was to throw him out of the house. But she didn’t – out of love for him: “Then he’ll leave us, his family, and shack up with the other woman!”
What about the supposedly unprosperous drivers of jeepneys and buses? As a wise man told me in my younger years, “Apparently you believe that those guys have only one woman cooking for them and feeding them.”
He added, “You’ve a long way to go if you don’t realize that those kind of wiseguys have one woman cooking for them, another one doing their laundry and cutting their hair.”