I know I’m a bit slow to the news but I heard that Wendy’s infamous salad bar has returned. Yeah that was a relic of the 1990s reincarnated! I remember as high school kids pigging on that and the occasional all-you-can-eat offering Pizza Hut would come out with every now and then. Unfortunately I wasn’t as successful as my friend was at stacking up a hearty helping to the salad as high as she could. There was a technique and an architecture to be followed and she had it down to a science!
A normal serving of salad
| SUPPORT INDEPENDENT SOCIAL COMMENTARY! Subscribe to our Substack community GRP Insider to receive by email our in-depth free weekly newsletter. Opt into a paid subscription and you'll get premium insider briefs and insights from us. Subscribe to our Substack newsletter, GRP Insider! Learn more |
Just observing even back then how other Wendy’s salad bar customers behaved, I can’t really say the same for a lot of Filipinos. You’d think that in a country where hunger is a way of life, wasting food would be a deeply-ingrained taboo. Unfortunately it seems to work the other way. Perhaps because Filipinos are so short of affordable food all the time, they tend to maximize every opportunity to stock up on chow. A catchy phrase in the vernacular encapsulates that tradition:
Makarami tuwing may palamon.
Literally translated, it means “stretch every opportunity to eat” (or something like that). Hey, on a side note, this is kind of like that old 30-word challenge, but in reverse. Maybe we can have a contest here to come up with as short an English translation to the above as possible!
Sorry I digress.
Yeah, so much of the time, I see a shameful amount of of those painstakingly-constructed salad bar edifices sitting as leftovers on tables. As if it weren’t enough that these customers could not even be bothered to clean after themselves after their piggish meal!
Evidently when it comes to buffet-type food serving, seeing the point takes a backseat to Filipinos’ lamon galore mentality. There’s a silver lining to all this, of course. Wendy’s salad bar together with the Pinoy Condition will be a boon to the pagpag industry. Yay!
Frustrated artist doing geek for a living.
This is why restaurants like Sizzlers will not last here in the Philippines due to their larger salad buffet. Sad that the said restaurants have good steak products.
I think the thought process is more subconscious and goes a little deeper than ‘lamon pag meron’. I think it’s more ‘baka mauubusan; dadamihan ko na’.
I also think that the people who are hungry/undernourished are the ones that *can’t* afford to eat at places like these – which says a lot about the attitude of the people who can.
Filipinos having too much and too little.
Food for instance, just a whiff of free or low cost food can see hordes of pinoys from all walks of life in queues.
Unlimited text and call, that will mean phone call until the wee hours of the morning and texting until their fingerprints are worn out. Never mind overloading the networks preventing other people with real need to make a call.
No speed limits or at least nobody to implement, put the pedal to the metal like the devil himself is after them, never mind what comes first, their death or their destination. Never care about other motorists’ safety. Same goes for other traffic related issues, i.e, headlight brightness and focus and color, exhaust noise, horn noise.
Censorship, even with the predominantly catholic population, still lots of teen / unwanted pregnancies, broken families, pinays earning their keep getting nude in front of a webcam, prostitution, etc.
Democracy, that means to the pinoy, free to put up your shanty wherever and whenever you want, jay walking, littering, spitting, urinating, defacating, vandalizing, etc. Free to do whatever you want as long as you can reason your way out of it, be it simple misdemeanors to all out graft and corruption, sometimes even murder.
It all boils down to self discipline and respect for other people, which the country is sorely lacking in.
Yes. Anything that relies on the pinoy looking out for the well being of their fellow pinoy is doomed.
goddamn, our country is the TRUE LAND OF THE FREE
I never see people clean up their trays at fast food places here. Is it more down to self-importance or laziness, or just because everyone knows the company is looking for any excuse to put its excess employees to use?
I always clean up when I can see the path to the bins. Not to try to set an example, of course – I gave up on that a while ago.
Oh, it’s back? I ought to check it out.
On the abuse of food promos, I remember another thing – the softdrink dispensers at Burger King.