Surprisingly, each had a different attitude toward the food on his plate. One ate the bun and the patty separately, another asked for a knife, while some ogled at the burger as if it were something from outer space.
For me, and perhaps for every Filipino who was able to see the ad, watching how bizarre other cultures find a hamburger was comparable to using chopsticks to eat loose rice for the first time: it was a novel experience.
And for Filipinos, asking why they find such commonplace food odd would not be such a bad idea.
In the Philippines, the hamburger has become staple food. Rich and poor alike have once held buns filled with beef patties in their hands, varying only in where they buy their burgers from.
The elite may frequent high-end restaurants for burgers where the patties use lean cuts from cows that are bred in tight spaces to minimize movement and preserve meat tenderness. Those who cannot afford such luxury buy from fast food chains where burgers are often sold in meals that go with French fries and drinks while the thrifty buy from buy-one-take-one burger stands.
But the hamburger is not only staple food to Filipinos; it is also a recurring theme in government scandals—providing interesting if not comic details to media coverage of some exposés.
At the height of the NBN-ZTE scandal, where former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and husband Jose Miguel Arroyo were implicated as having received cuts from the contractors of the broadband deal, former Elections Chairman Benjamin Abalos gave the hamburger claim to fame.
He said that the anomalous transactions were discussed over golf, sometimes over his Wack-Wack Country Club’s famous hamburger. Never mind that he pronounced it as “hamburjer.”
Recently hamburgers took center stage again due to reports that a retired official of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (Pagcor) sought reimbursement for food reportedly distributed to members of the police force helpful to the government agency.
Reports said the official attempted to cash-in a check worth P21M, allegedly for six months’ worth of hamburgers bought from McDonald’s, the fast food chain that has evolved to be the icon of globalization for its ubiquity.
The Philippine Daily Inquirer published a story based on a letter from McDonald’s, saying that the amount was justified since it was in payment for “multiple transactions involving multiple stores.”
And while the media coverage pressures government to look into the alleged irregularities and Pagcor to explain, the Filipino public can only wonder how eating P21M worth of hamburgers would feel like.
But the recurrence of the hamburger as a theme in some of the most sensationalized government scandals is as alarming as it is insulting.
It tells us that we live in a country where corruption is as trivialized as burger we can get from burger stand in the corner of our street, that corruption is as widespread in the Philippines as buy-one-take-one burger stores and that corruption never stops—in fact you get more by just buying one.
As this is being written, the scent of cooked burger patties from the downstairs Angel’s Burger is filling the evening air. But having had more than my fair share of buy-one-take-one burgers, I am not in the least bit interested. Someday, I might even get sick of the idea of hamburgers.
Perhaps someday, Filipinos will get sick of the idea of corruption too—and find ways to rid this country of such institutional malady.
Image from here.
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