Full markets, empty pockets

I have done this at the grocery more times than I care to admit. You reach the cashier, hear the total, and look at the basket again.

Do I really need this?

The avocados can wait. Also the salmon. Maybe the yogurt, too. Take the cheaper fish. Keep the rice. You make a few quick adjustments, pay, and go home. No drama. No one calls it food insecurity. You just tell yourself, “Next time na lang.”

Then I came across this figure: 52.6 million Filipinos could not afford a healthy diet in 2025. Among Southeast Asian countries with available data, only Indonesia had more.

I had to read the number twice.

Fifty-two point six million is almost too large to mean anything. I can imagine 40 students in a classroom. I can imagine a packed gym, even a stadium. But 52.6 million people? At some point, people become commas and decimal points.

A family table is easier to picture.

Rice. One sud-an. Maybe vegetables. Someone notices there are only two pieces of fish left, so he takes half. Nobody discusses it. Families somehow learn these things. And then there is that familiar line from a mother or father: “Busog pa ako.”

I have heard that line many times. I am not so sure anymore that it always means what it says.

The 52.6 million figure is easy to misunderstand. It does not mean that many Filipinos are starving. Hunger and food insecurity are different from being unable to afford a healthy diet. Even so, 31.4 percent of Filipino households faced moderate to severe food insecurity in 2023.

A local study on food insecurity also caught my attention because its findings sounded so ordinary. Larger families were more vulnerable. So were renters, households with older heads, and families living in places where food insecurity has persisted. Families with greater wealth and higher educational attainment generally fared better. Home gardening was associated with lower food insecurity, too.

Nothing surprising there, really.

That may be the problem.

For many households, food insecurity probably does not begin with an empty table. It begins with the electricity bill arriving at the same time as tuition. Or maintenance medicine running out before payday. Or two children needing school money on the same morning. Or the tricycle fare going up by five pesos, which sounds trivial until you multiply it by several rides, several people, several weeks.

Something gives. Quite often, it is food.

Not all of it. That is what makes the problem easy to miss. You still buy rice. You still cook dinner. But perhaps you buy less meat this week. Fruit becomes optional. Milk disappears. The children still have baon, although it looks suspiciously similar from Monday to Friday.

Then there are the farmers and fisherfolk themselves. They grow our rice, harvest our vegetables, and bring in the fish, yet some still worry about what they can put on their own tables. That is hard to ignore.

And they know how quickly a good season can go bad.

Too much rain. Kulang ang ulan. A typhoon when harvest is almost there. Several days when the boats cannot go out. Around a quarter of Filipinos depend on agriculture, and much of that livelihood remains at the mercy of weather and pests. We encounter the story later as another “Mahal naman” at the market.

Somewhere behind the price are also policy choices: imports, tariffs, ayuda, irrigation, wages, farm support, storage, and transport. Each solves something. Each can create another problem. Imports can help when supply is tight. Social protection can keep a family going through a bad stretch. Better incomes obviously help. The USDA even projects that our food insecurity could fall considerably over the next decade.

I hope so.

But try telling someone budgeting tonight’s dinner that things may look better in 2036. What keeps bringing me back to that first statistic is one word: healthy.

We Filipinos are very good at making sure there is something to eat. Add more water to the soup. Slice the fish thinner. Open a can of sardines. Cook another cup of rice. Make the vaind reach everybody.

There is ingenuity in that. There is also something sad about having to become so good at it.

Because may pagkain is not always the same as masustansiya ang pagkain. You can eat three times a day and still be poorly nourished. A lunch box can contain food without containing much nutrition. A stomach can be full while the diet remains wanting.

Food insecurity, then, does not always look like an empty plate. Sometimes the plate looks perfectly ordinary.

You notice it only when you remember what used to be there. The fruit. The milk. The extra piece of fish. Or the serving Nanay quietly gave to somebody else before saying she was already full.

And tomorrow, at another grocery counter, someone will hear the total and look into the basket.

Something has to go. “Next time na lang.”

The trouble is, for far too many Filipino families, next time keeps getting moved.

***

Doc H fondly describes himself as a ”student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.