ever heard of pagpag?

All credit to John McCrarey for passing along this video.

Ever heard of pagpag? I'd never heard of it before.

It's the Filipino term for recycled fast food, especially fried chicken. Food scraps are collected from the garbage bins of fast-food establishments like the famous Jollibee chain. Plastic utensils and containers are collected as well; everything gets taken to the slums. Once there, enterprising people wash the containers and utensils; they wash, clean, heavily salt, re-flour, and fry up the food scraps, which are then sold for cheap to people in the slums.

It's a gross concept, but you can almost see how such a parasitic industry might arise: people generate so much food waste at the regular food establishments. This notion of reusing food isn't much different from homeless people in the States rummaging through dumpsters to find scraps to eat. In the video below, our host travels to the Filipino slums and tries some pagpag. His reaction is about what you'd expect: everything is a bit too dry and tastes very much recooked. Pagpag comes with risks, of course, as one doctor in the video notes. You can get infected when eating it, and diarrhea is always lurking somewhere in the background. Enjoy!