FILIPINO VEGETARIANS aren’t that many yet, and seem to be confined to environmentalists like Gutierrez, along with animal-rights activists and cancer patients. But PETA’s campaign is certainly gaining converts among the more youthful and trendy lot; Baker says that last year, PETA gave away 25,000 vegetarian starter kits in the country.

	PETA's aggressive campaign for vegetarianism uses both glamour...

PETA’s media-targeted campaign has deliberately been splashy, and last year even released an ad with former “Baywatch” babe Pamela Anderson, clad only in lettuce leaves, urging people to”“turn a new leaf” and go vegetarian. In contrast, the Slow Food campaign has been quietly establishing a foothold among older urbanites. Founded in 1986 by longtime activist Carlo Petrini who started out picketing the first McDonald’s outlet in Rome, Slow Food—yet another reaction to the fast-food lifestyle—now has 80,000 members in 100 countries.

	...and gore to lure followers.

That it is now in the Philippines is largely due to the late Doreen Fernandez. A year before her death in June 2002, the white-haired, bespectacled academic and food critic gathered a small group of people cooking to discuss the idea of launching the slow food movement in the country. She handpicked the group’s members from local food circles who either worked in food preparation, marketing, restaurant operation, teaching and research, or simply loved to cook. The eclectic mix eventually formed the first Filipino Slow Food chapter, or convivium (from the Latin word for feast or banquet), in November 2003.

“Slow Food is for savoring the gustatory pleasures of the world and keeping those pleasures existing,” explains Ipat Luna, an environmental lawyer and one of three members of the group with no direct link to the food industry.”“So the more that people patronize nontraditional, nonseasonal, nonlocal foods, not only is one’s health on the line but also the capacity to keep providing slow food, which is better-tasting and friendly to the planet.”

In other words, Slow Food is the exact opposite of fast food: small-scale, local, seasonal and traditional. And by local, food is not meant to just be grown locally but by someone the consumer knows. As a consequence, Slow Food also frowns on commercial manipulations of food whether it is processed, genetically modified or pesticide-laden.

That’s where the movement’s connection to organics comes in. Organic market entrepreneur Mara Pardo de Tavera, also a convivium member, puts it this way: “With Slow Food, there’s the whole aspect of growing things organically. Because how can you be traditional if you don’t practice traditional farming? Traditional farming is equal to organic. Before the use of chemicals, everything was organic.”

Pardo de Tavera lives and breathes organic food. At one point in her life, she used to tend one of the first natural food stores in New York. She also has a European degree in hotel and restaurant management that further refined her whole concept of food and pointed her toward a more natural lifestyle.

In 1986, after living in the United States for eight years, Pardo de Tavera returned to the Philippines. At first the homecoming seemed a bad idea because she had a hard time finding organic food in Manila. And just a month after her return, she got sick and even contracted chicken pox. “I was so frustrated and so unhappy,” she recalls. “I said to myself“‘why did I come back to this?’ But then I decided to look at the other side of the picture. If I was going through this, I really had my work cut out for me to change peoples’ diets and mindset about food.”

THAT ORDEAL served to inspire her in setting up the first organic market in the country (and the whole of Asia) in 1993. Originally located at the Greenbelt mall park in Makati, the market has had to be relocated twice in the last two years to give way to the park renovations. Today the organic market is open three times a week (Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday), from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., on the side of the mall complex along Legaspi Street.

Organically grown produce as fruits, vegetables, rice and other cereals, free-range chickens, eggs and bangus (milkfish) are sourced from pockets of organic farms in Luzon (Bulacan, Cavite, Nueva Ecija, Zambales, Mountain Province, Benguet, Palawan), Bacolod, and Mindanao (Bukidnon, Cagayan de Oro, Davao).

The choice of Makati was intentional. “It has to be in Makati because we have to set the trend. It has to begin at the top and trickle down,” explains Pardo de Tavera. And in the business scheme of things, the preference for the city could just be as apt as no place makes the same marketing impact as Makati does.

The organic market has since branched out to the equally upscale Alabang Town Center. Pardo de Tavera has also become a regular supplier of the organic food section of Rustan’s Supermarket in Makati and Rockwell. She has her sights now set on putting up an organic supermarket, a one-stop shop for all the needs of people who have opted for an organic lifestyle.

But the growing demand for organic food now comes as well from those with fewer pesos to spare, even areas that cater to the Prada-from-Patpong and DKNY-de-Divisoria crowd have organic markets. Less posh supermarkets now also have organic food sections, some of which even offer organic rice.

The trouble is, consumers can’t be too sure if what they are buying is organic or not. There is no government regulation on organics certification and labeling. At least with the markets managed by Pardo de Tavera, they can be assured that the produce are certified organic. At this time, only Pardo de Tavera does her own independent checking, which even extends to the process of production.

Known to be “autocratic” about keeping a reputation for being strictly organic, Pardo de Tavera has no qualms with booting out dishonest concessionaires from the markets she manages, giving them only a day’s notice and no second chance. “It’s because I also eat the food,” she says. “Everything we sell here, I bring home. That’s my lifestyle, always has been.”

So it also ends up being the obligation of the consumer to find out. Anyway, organic producers are voluntarily labeling their goods. Some consumers are also trying to grow their own vegetables in the backyard — the ones that only need regular care and no fertilizers like kangkong (swamp cabbage), sayote (chayote), and alugbati (Ceylon spinach).

But many organic foods are still priced out of the reach of low-income buyers. Pardo de Tavera admits that her organic markets’ produce are a bit more expensive.

“It’s because we’re not even hitting half of one percent of the market in Metro Manila,” she says. “We still have a limited market outreach. On top of it, we don’t get subsidies from government — no assistance, no one who’d provide capital for a delivery truck. The farmers have to develop their own farms, manage themselves enough to come to this market and sell.”

The output of organic farms is definitely no match to that of commercial farms that spray a lot of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers to boost harvests. All that organic farmers have are the manual inputs of composting and killing pests with their bare hands.