Why Vegetarian Restaurants Tend Not to Last Long in the Filipino Market (Hint: It's All About the TYPICAL Filipino Diet)

Laidback Gardener

Years ago, I remember how Little India Healthy Cuisine opened in Cebu. Before that, there was also Planet Vegis. Planet Vegis had closed during the pandemic. Little India Healthy Cuisine opened in One Pavilion Mall in 2019 (if my memory serves right). Later, Little India Healthy Cuisine became a delivery service. It saddened me that my second-favorite Indian restaurant permanently closed, as shown by a Google Maps search. I was having some more plant-based food to increase my vegetable intake, since I was on a journey to weight loss. I was thinking that might be because Bollywood Tandoor is actually hard to defeat. I remember ordering some vegetarian items at Bollywood Tandoor. I confess that non-sattvic vegetarian items contain garlic and onion, making them easier to consume than sattvic ones. But I was after weight loss, because I remember my blood pressure shot up before the pandemic. 

I thought about the times when I ate at Little India Healthy Cuisine (back when dine-in was available), when I would usually take a set meal. People were shocked at the vegetarian idea. After all, people going to Indian restaurants tend to think about eating either chicken (which may be the most signature dish), goat, and, for some, Indian seafood. One person entered Little India Healthy Cuisine and found out that it was vegetarian. Some would leave without giving it a try. Some people thought Little India was the one that was from Gaisano Country Mall, only to be told, "That's Bollywood!" If I must confess, the very first thing I ate at Mr. India (which is now Bollywood Tandoor), was their chicken curry and some vegetarian shawarma. When Bollywood Tandoor opened and Mr. India closed, my first dish to try at the former was actually their delicious Indian goat stew. 

Unsurprisingly, a Chinese vegetarian restaurant in Quezon City, called Kongtiak, also closed. It happened sometime before Little India Healthy Cuisine in Cebu started its decline. As I look into this, I actually blame the unhealthy Filipino diet for their collapse! 

An interesting exchange of words 

From the Keeta website, writer Noel Sanchez Villaflor gives this interesting tidbit on the Cebuano epidemic of not eating enough vegetables:

A Vocabulary Lesson

Serve him a leafy salad, and he’ll say thank you for feeding him sagbot. That means weed in the vernacular, the kind that ruminants feast on, not that rolled stick of pure joy you first had a puff of in high school.

Speaking of school, if your grades consistently gave your parents a minor heart attack, then you perfectly fit the bill of the estudyante nga namayabas—a student who cannot resist picking fiber-rich guava fruits from the bayabas trees on his way to campus and so ends up cutting classes all the time.

And when the estudyanteng namayabas finally grows up but finds out that he sucks at adulting, then he becomes someone who’s nangamote. The root word, of course, is kamote, a root crop that older generations of Cebuanos associate with hardship and flatulence.

Naturally, it wasn’t hard for contemporary Cebuanos to embrace the term kamote driver—which probably originated from the capital—as part of their everyday lexicon of plant-based insults. Now I’m not sure about how the term came to be, but it probably has to do with all that gas and what it does to the driver’s bowels that makes one twist the throttle like mad, supposedly the consequence of eating too much of the root crop. 

Now treating healthy food this way isn’t fair, but if you’re too sensitive (onion-skinned) and all this negativity is making you tear up, you better stop reading because our snarky word wizards of old have an adjective for woke folks like you: kapayason. That’s because when you pick a fruit or snap a branch of the kapayas or papaya, the broken ends “weep” copious tears of white sap.

As if that’s not painful enough, a below-the-belt tag has stuck with the kamatis, or tomato, for the longest time. You probably won’t hear this often nowadays, but if someone is gikamatis, then that someone just went through a rite of passage down there but the healing process hasn’t gone too well. I will leave it to your inflamed imagination to figure out what a juicy, plump tomato has to do with all this suffering. (Hint: this applies only to boys.)

I wouldn’t blame if you’ve lost your appetite by now. So imagine the collective dislike towards vegetables, fruits and root crops of a people who grew up hearing about sagbot, the namayabas, the nangamote, the kapayason, and the gikamatis. Who can blame them when such nomenclature that’s as colorful as it is unpalatable has festered like mold for generations?

This reminded me of the problem most teenagers had. My high school science teacher was trying to teach us to eat more vegetables. I could remember why I even fell in love with an average-looking nerd back then. I grew to enjoy eating vegetable salads a lot in my teenage years. That girl I  liked but never dared to pursue was practically disciplined to eat her greens. Most of the girls I met, weren't disciplined to eat their greens. Speaking of which, eating "sagbot" (weed) was a statement I grew up with. My late paternal grandmother would joke that eating raw vegetable salad made me like a goat. She wasn't too fond of green and leafy ones, because of a fallacy that they don't "digest easily". I may have had a loving relationship with her, but explaining modern knowledge to her was a chore. It might be because she was born in the 1910s, an era where several people married too soon. She died at 91 years old, while I believe most of her peers had died at very young ages! 

I received some insults, such as "namamayabas," because I didn't perform well in school back then. I confess that somehow, my hatred for school got justified by the fact that the school system cares more about grades than learning (read here). Ironically, caring more about grades than learning causes grades to suffer. Just think of how often it happens that several people fail in the first year, second year, or even third year of high school, during K+10. I wonder if my friends who failed back in elementary and high school, got the term namamayabas. Even worse, I heard how often meat deprivation was used as punishment. If that's the case, nobody would want to eat vegetables if vegetables are used as punishment. People should be eating vegetables even if they're not being punished. Sadly, what do you expect from a culture that uses chores as punishment is stupid. Grounding (ex., not being allowed to go to a party due to an offense), time-outs, spanking at the buttocks, scolding, or any reasonable form of punishment should be given. Instead, some people are using vegetables as punishment instead of punishing children for not eating their vegetables! 

Given all of that, I wonder if Filipino customers at most Indian restaurants are actually aware that several of them tend to use tomatoes in their menu. That might explain why there's a tangy taste in my favorite Indian cooking. Sambar is practically tomato soup. What made me furious was that there were some who ate the chicken dosa but didn't drink the sambar. A balanced diet for meat eaters is more vegetables than meat. I would eat the chicken dosa (which, many times, contains, to no surprise, a lot of tomatoes) and drink the sambar. Sadly, I've also noticed grown-ups who have even disregarded the whole tomato in the chicken biryani, and ate the chicken. One should eat both the tomato and the chicken. Did the term gikamatis contribute to this epidemic of not eating enough vegetables? 

The statistics are indeed disturbing

What's discouraging for me to read is that a whopping 74% of Filipino kids eat fewer vegetables. The report was published in the Inquirer last March 20, 2023, which was post-pandemic. I couldn't be certain, but a slower COVID recovery is because so many Filipinos hardly eat vegetables. Just reading this can make my blood boil:

Citing the World Health Organization’s 2015 school-based student health survey in the Philippines, the report noted that 74 percent of children aged 13 to 15 years old consume less than three portions of vegetables daily, while 28 percent drink at least one soft drink a day.“Poor diets are contributing to a triple burden of malnutrition with undernutrition, in the form of poor growth and micronutrient deficiencies, co-existing with increasing rates of overweight,” the Unicef said.

“This triple burden of malnutrition is being driven by systems that are failing to provide children with adequate diets, space to play and exercise, access to safe water and hygienic environments and financial security,” it added.

This might be attributed to this silly mentality among Filipinos. It's the Cebuano saying, "Kung pait ang kinabuhi, butangi lang ug asukar." In English, it means, "If life is bitter, just add sugar." (read here). The silly adage may explain why so many fail to eat enough fruits and vegetables. Many times, there's always this bitter taste in vegetables, even when they're prepared right. I remember eating spinach goat stew at Bollywood Tandoor. I confess that there was a bitter taste of spinach, even if it was well-prepared. Given the silly adage, that may explain why so many Filipinos tend not to eat enogh vegetables, because of the bitter taste. I confess I actually struggled to eat vegetables when I was little. Many times, it was attributed that a child's taste buds are underdeveloped. However, many adults act like spoiled children when they're required to eat vegetables!

It's also no secret that Malaysians and Filipinos have similar diabetes rates (read why here). Filipinos and Malaysians are descended from the Austronesian people, which is why they're called "huan-a" by the ethnic Chinese living in Malaysia and the Philippines, and to an extent, Indonesia. Sure, the Malaysian economy may be better than the Philippines. However, many Malaysians share a similar problem with Filipinos when it comes to vegetable consumption. The same problem is also true among Indonesians. A Southeast Asian Chinese (such as myself) might call it the common problem among those called "huan-a". Huan-a was a derogatory term used for natives of Southeast Asia, not just Filipinos, but also Malaysians and Indonesians. I would prefer to use the term "Hui li pin lang" to refer to Filipino. However, the term "huan-a" can be a neutral term, meaning native of Southeast Asia. 

Going back, it should be a big disturbance because the food pyramid requires more carbohydrate food than protein. That's why I skip meat on certain days to balance things out. My love for meat dishes couldn't be hidden. What I'm not going to hide is that I eat at vegetarian restaurants to balance out my meat-vegetable intake. The statistics would mean that vegetarian restaurants may not last long. We could try to promote healthy eating, but that's easier said than done. Should I even be surprised at the results huh? Sad but true, that healthy eating is a really hard thing to promote in the Philippines!