DAVAO CITY, 11 March — The Philippines may still be an agricultural country but Filipinos lag behind other Asian countries in per capita consumption of vegetables, a Department of Agriculture official says.
Rene Rafael Espino, director of the DA’s High Value Commercial Crops Program, said that even if vegetables are being grown in almost every backyard in the country, Filipinos are not eating vegetables as much as their Asian neighbors.
“This is in contrast to people in non-agricultural countries,” Espino said.
“In terms of vegetable consumption, we are among the region’s lowest,” Espino told a gathering of vegetable growers in a hotel in Davao City on Friday.
The per capita vegetable consumption among Filipinos is 35 kilograms a year as compared to 170 kilograms among the Chinese, 90 kilograms for Indonesians and Thais, Espino said.
“We don’t get to eat much vegetable because we usually prefer meat. Usually, we don’t teach our children about proper nutrition,” he said.
Noticeably, Filipinos are not fond of salads, preferring cooked vegetables. Health specialists say, however, that properly cooked food is desirable especially in places in the country where sanitation is a problem.
