A crying need for vegetables education

I was in bed very late last night in a semi-asleep, semi-awake mode while my husband stayed tuned to some television program a few minutes after midnight. He nudged me to full awakeness, as we both caught the most unbelievably pitiable footage of extreme malnutrition right in our own country. For a while, I thought I was tuned in to CNN, watching a scene in some war-torn country or Ethiopia, where mothers and children are left to starve.

It was shocking to see this Filipino impoverished mother looking straight at the camera, revealing sordid tales of hardship. Her family was eating rice and nothing else for their scanty meals. Her toddler beside her was obviously wasting away, surviving, she said, on nothing but coffee. The child was being fed mostly with coffee instead of milk! I thought to myself: This will not only hinder her growth. It’ll kill her! The mother herself was emaciated. It turned out that we were watching the tail end of some coverage, which ended with black and white supers dramatically confirming what I feared. The little girl died less than two months after the TV material was shot.

The very next day, I was able to trace the unforgettable material to GMA-7. Nessa Valdellon, GMA vice-president of Public Affairs, informed me that I must have caught "Eye Witness," award-winning documentaries of GMA-7 that are replayed every Saturday from 11 p.m. and up. The disturbing documentary that I described to her, according to Nessa, was shot only two years ago in the Bicol region.

The interviewer in the documentary asked the woman if she couldn’t get vegetables to eat. The beleaguered woman only stared at her. "What about meat?" the same interviewer asked in the vernacular. The woman looked at her as though she had asked something completely ridiculous, totally beyond her comprehension. Don’t you understand, she seemed to ask, her family can only afford to buy rice and nothing else.

It was at this point that I recalled the current multimedia advertising campaign of Knorr cubes. On TV, the commercial shows a mother painfully preparing to bid her son goodbye. He is leaving home to go to the city, apparently to study in some faraway place. Before the son leaves, the mother serves him some simple vegetable soup. The commercial makes it plain that this simple dish of vegetables is prepared with Knorr into a delicious vegetable soup, something the mother and son take regularly and with gusto. My personal simple takeout here is that vegetables can be a delicious part of a family’s eating habits.

Being bicycled with the thematic material is another television commercial that features a host of very young children joyfully singing their hearts out while dancing to a truly nice jingle about vegetables. This same catchy jingle is frequently heard on radio. Nice beat, good lyrics that are easy to remember, easy to sing.

As a matter of fact, I think the vegetable soup campaign of Knorr can be the start of a much-needed educational campaign on vegetables and nutrition all over the country. I distinctly remember Unilever communications Director Chito Macapagal mentioning a feeding program as one of the volunteer projects undertaken by some of the employees of Unilever a couple of years ago. That heart-rending documentary of GMA-7 clearly shows that there is an urgent need to educate parents regarding easy, inexpensive nutritious feeding especially of their young children.

Clearly, there are enormous, inexpensive vegetables that all families, even those belonging to the D and E socioeconomic households, should be able to plant and harvest anywhere — even in make-do pots and cans, all year round. There are vegetables, too, that one can buy for a song, provided you are told when and where to go. Very importantly, mothers and fathers should be taught the easy and practical preparations of vegetables as nutritious viands for their families.

Call it a desperate need for non-traditional communication.

Credits. Client-company, Unilever. Agencies, JWT and Eon.

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A crying need for vegetables education