The same menus are offered to us every time we come here to eat. And we are comfortable with such familiar food packages they perpetually offered to us. As we are queuing inside fastfood chains, buying all these familiar greasy offerings, and we blankly stare on their florescent-lighted menu board, randomly seeing those usual words, equally staring back at us, same words and same menus. Solo, Budget Meals, Combo, Regular, these are descriptive words, all urging us to decide on what to buy, what to eat and what new combinations of oily foods to chew and for our restless taste buds to indulge.
We now become pre-programmed consumers which we are unaware of. Anywhere in the country, as one gets inside these fastfood chains, one literally becomes an automaton food fanatic as our consumerists culture has made us to be.
Sadly, we are unaware of the dangerous subliminal message we are sending on our youngsters by this mindless patronage we have on national brand fastfood. We are becoming lenient about the issue of nutrition and the choice of foods, now that we patronized food products that are of unknown value in terms of nutrients. The rising case of obesity among our youths can be attributed to this concern, backed up by endless flooding of TV commercials commissioned by these multibillion food business companies, sending us their untiring marketing appeals to seemingly hypnotized consumers. The subliminal message is that we can only have our meaningful family bonding inside their store, and altogether we can live healthy lifestyles by tirelessly devouring their greasy fried chicken, disturbingly stored and frozen inside their cold storage for unknown period of time. Deceptively, their TV commercials have invitingly showed us their hot and crispy drumsticks, appealing massively, as if, it was freshly dressed from their backdoor poultry farm.
Have we seen enough of their TV commercials? We never heard them talked about the nutritional facts of their products. Not once, did we hear them explained to us the integrity of the raw farm products they are using to serve us, their thousands if not millions of nameless consumers like us. Yet, these companies shall continue to flourish at the cost of countless young lives that will eventually succumb to future unnamed heath risks and the unstoppable increase case of obesity among our children.
The next time you take your queue at these food chains, try to look around you and observe the variety of age groups that are relentlessly spending and consuming on all these junk foods. For us who were born and were trained during childhood to eat our green leafy vegetables, for us who were reared by our parents and grandparents to consume our plateful share of cooked milled corn No.15 that was completely submerged by a cupful of Malungay soup. Who can forget those peculiar metal dishware we used before, those dishware that noisily clang during mealtime, commonly called then as Sartin? We who reach middle age and saw all the benefits brought by those boyhood healthy lifestyle we had then, we want to teach our youngsters about this. And nothing can beat our common backyard Malungay, we are witnesses to this. As our old folks had showed us then, we are passing this wisdom to our youngsters. It is health investment for our youngsters to eat healthy foods at their young age. No amount of artificial food supplements can outdo this best practice of eating green leafy vegetables and our common backyard fruits.