I was enjoying my marinated pork chop when I learned that I shouldn’t.
It was my first meal in Nueva Ecija since I arrived the previous day. I was having breakfast with Mama, while my two sisters were still asleep, and my father was with my uncles in the backyard. She was having tuyo. We shared the spicy vinegar in the saucer.
When I was younger, we barely ate meat. Yet people rarely believed that, for we are what people call a “healthy-looking” family. By healthy, they meant chubby. And in such cases, people think you must be eating well.
In the morning, our usual rice meal is composed of a scrambled egg (that Mama stole from our chicken’s nest) with white onion slices or talbos ng kamote or bulaklak ng katuray. If you are tired of eating such, you can have rice with epak (coffee and sugar) or gatas ng tigre (salt). The most important thing is you keep on eating.
Having been raised in a farming community, my parents believe one should never skip a meal, especially breakfast. Better to eat without viand, than not eat at all.
In the afternoon, we would have inasal, bangus, or tilapia as our viand — those tig-piso junk food that claims such flavor, or instant noodles with slices of ridged luffa gourd. If you’re tired of such fare, too, you can eat rice with soy sauce/bagoong-isda combined with used cooking oil.
Our evening meal, on the other hand, depends on what my father, a tricycle driver, and mother, a sewer (of doormat and potholder) make.
On good days, we’ll have pork adobo. Mama will chop the one-fourth meat into match-sized bites and will pour water on it as if she’s making sinigang—an adobong bahog-kanin. That will be our rice meal for, more or less, two days.
But there isn’t always a good day in a week. Thus, it’s mostly what’s available: dagang bukid, palakang bukid, or susô, or our neighbor’s chicken — depending on the season. Later, eating pork became a reminder that it had been a “good day” for my family. And we always looked forward to those days.
But this breakfast was different. Mama shared why we had pork even for breakfast. She told me they’d been eating pork for almost a week now — adobo, sinigang, pinatisan. She had tried nearly every homemade dish for pork. And my sisters must have been tired of eating meat.
They were forced to slaughter our 15 hogs (three were native, two inahin) that they had been taking care of, mostly using debt-incurred feeds, for months now. They even asked extra money from me to have the backyard pigpen extended last month. When we thought the African swine fever (ASF) had spared Nueva Ecija, it didn’t. Now, a fattener pig was all that was left in the pigpen.
Mama said Papa was advised by other hog growers to slaughter our pigs when he saw the following symptoms: decreased appetite and weakness, redness, and blotching of lesions on the pig’s skin.
They were forced to aggregate seven of our hogs for P500-P3,000 each. The remaining hogs were then slaughtered and offered for P100 per kilo, just like how other growers in the town would sell it. Some kilos were even sold for deferred payments.
Mama said they had computed everything and declared that we lost more than P80,000 potential income. A sum of money that we were looking forward to using as our initial savings, to eventually reclaim our recently pawned 1,200-square-meter rice field (for a P150,000 two-year contract).
According to the Department of Agriculture, the Philippines is the world’s 10th largest pork consumer, and also the world’s seventh-biggest pork importer. Agriculture Secretary William Dar said last November that smuggled pork meat from China could be behind the outbreak.
Mama said she heard some people in the nearby sari-sari store talking about the outbreak. They had their opinion and “haka-haka” about the virus. Some claimed it probably came from those large-scale pig farm owners. Others said maybe it was a government scheme — a smokescreen so we’d pay less attention to other matters like extrajudicial killings and corruption.
But one thing is for sure, this ASF is hitting the Philippine hog industry hard, and it is hitting the small-scale hog raisers like us even harder.
“Magkapresyo na nga lang ang isang kilong talong at baboy ngayon, eh (A kilo of pork is just like a kilo of eggplant now),” said Mama as she stared at my half-eaten pork chop—trying to make the mood lighter. But she couldn’t even convince herself.
Then I learned that Papa and my uncles were again butchering hogs in our backyard, just like what they’d been doing for weeks.
The marinated pork chop tasted a little different this time — bitter, I guess.
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Andyleen C. Feje, 25, is a farmer’s daughter from Nueva Ecija.