A stew cooked with leftover meat and bones thrown away that is cooked or fried again and seasoned with a sauce: this is the "pagpag", a lunch that is increasingly consumed in the poorest suburbs of Manila before the relentless rise in food prices.
"Everyone here likes my food, I have no complaints," Evelyn Blasorca, a neighbor of Happyland who has been selling pagpag ("shaken" or "recycled" in Tagalog) for years, tells EFE, a recipe that all her customers combine with rice. white.
In the neighborhood where he lives, hidden between the docks of the commercial port of Manila, and invisible from the road that borders the polluted coast of the city where it is accessed, some 120,000 people live poorly and sleep tightly canned in fragile shacks.
Ironically, this "city" that rises on mountains of rubbish is called "Happyland" (happy land, in English).
The intense stench hits the visitor as soon as they enter: under a relentless sun and suffocating humidity, rubbish finds its ideal ecosystem here to impregnate everything with a heavy and penetrating fetid odor that discourages you from continuing to walk.
The narrow streets, mostly less than a meter wide, are home to hundreds of shacks, often lined with discarded containers buried under mud. In them, many of its inhabitants work with garbage: some separating plastics; others, cardboard; and a few recycle metal parts.
Other neighbors, like Roweno Cabaluc, are "pagpag collectors" whose day begins at dawn visiting restaurants and fast food chains that give them the day's waste in large plastic bags.
Cabuluc returns, already at dawn, to the streets of Happyland, where he rescues the chewed remains of food and bones in a container and separates intact pieces of chicken that some anonymous diner has despised, the most coveted and difficult to find pieces.
After the first round of sorting the meat waste, Cabuluc delivers the recycled food to Evelyn Blasorca, who cleans and boils it, to then prepare two varieties of pagpag with it: one meat is refried with flour and the other is marinated and seasoned. with onions, vegetables and spices, which is then accompanied by a sauce.
"In Happyland everyone eats pagpag, there are places that prepare it better and others worse, but in general everyone likes it," explains Jay Carriel, a 27-year-old who has been selling plastic for seven years.
With the inflation unleashed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, now close to 8%, the pagpag is increasingly common among the residents of Happyland and those of Tondo, the district that includes Happyland and other shanty towns on the Manila coast, and whose estimated population is around 630,000 people according to the official census.
With the price of onions that reached 700 pesos per kilo ($12.70) in the markets last Christmas, three times more than in rich countries such as Switzerland or Denmark, the pagpag sellers had to manage to keep the rations fluctuating between 25 and 30 Philippine pesos (0.40 euro cents).
"I am selling more and more pagpag, I am happy," says Blasorca, who relates that after the hardest period of the pandemic there were moments of lower sales, but the rise in food prices has once again increased their income, since people avoid buy in the market more frequently.
Some pagpag collectors, however, feel uncomfortable when asked about the selection process of the meat consumed, since inside the plastic bags that accumulate the waste you can see the logo of the two largest fast food chains in the country , who "donate" the waste to these garbage laborers.
"They think these restaurants will get mad if they go out in the press as purveyors of chewed meat," says Jay Rey, a worker at Melissa Pearls, an association that provides free meals for kids and adults in Happyland, often connecting companies that want to advertise food-service events. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with those most in need.
"At least we prepare fresh food, and they don't eat pagpag all day," says Rey. "But here people don't get sick, they have a hard stomach," he adds.
However, the constant consumption of pagpag for children can cause failure to thrive and malnutrition, as well as Hepatitis A, diarrhea and cholera, according to the Philippine National Anti-Poverty Commission.
