In 2024, a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey found that 17.6% of Filipino families experienced involuntary hunger, an increase compared to the previous year.
Many of these people cannot afford a single meal, so they resort to buying pagpag–leftover food collected from garbage and dumps, which are recycled for selling. We visited Tondo, one of the slums located in Manila, where we met up with Mama Rosita, a cook and vendor of pagpag.

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