Food for Thought

Gaz has been teasing me recently about my efforts to reduce waste in the household. It all started when I reused some chicken drumsticks which I had used in a soup (ordinarily we would discard this as the flavour and texture of the meat would have all been boiled out of it for the 3 hours it has been in the pot!) for a new dish.

The dish is a Hakka dish called Suen Lat Choi. It can transform leftover meat into an appetite provoking, deliciously spicy and tangy dish. My mother used to cook this with leftover roast duck or roast pork, mustard greens, assam keping, tamarind juice and dried chillies. The meat should preferably have been roasted, to add depth to the dish. I think it is an ingenious way of transforming leftovers into a new dish altogether.

However, Gaz was not impressed with it. He would not have liked it even if I had used freshly roasted chicken for it because he does not like spicy dishes. He likens my dish to pagpag!

Literally translated, pagpag means to dust off (maggots, dirt etc). Think of your half eaten KFC chicken, collected and thrown into a dumpsite, which are then scavenged by the poor. Meat are picked off the bone, and eaten straight away if they smelled OK. If not, they are washed in water and re-fried (to kill bacteria) and eaten. There are some who cooks pagpag and sells them to others.

In the Phillipines where this is happening, pagpag is sometimes the only way of providing for the family's only meal for the day. There are areas within the city which are home to squatters who are below the poverty line. While some people can afford to eat at fast food restaurants (which are generally more expensive than local eateries), the less well-to-do can only afford to eat whatever that comes out from the back end of the restaurant.

This is not isolated to the Phillipines alone, but is an issue present in most developing countries. Hunger and poverty forces people to go to the extremes. We are very lucky in being able to have enough food for leftovers. Some simply have no choice but to eat only discarded food.