One of the highlights of this writer’s journalism career was the opportunity to cover the agriculture beat. That stint was years ago but we never lost interest in what the government is doing in line with its food sufficiency and food security goals — both vital aspirations and priority objectives for a developing country like ours.
This is why we were delighted to learn from media colleagues that the Department of Agriculture (DA) under Secretary Art Yap has long embarked on a silent, unheralded yet crucial advocacy for an increase in consumption of native vegetables through a very creative and highly acclaimed grassroots program called “O! May Gulay” wisely dubbed OMG.
We learned about this DA advocacy from friends in media who recently came from a visit to Cebu City and saw the conduct of the OMG there. The advocacy is highlighted by a cooking contest involving students at the secondary school level who whip up novel recipes using home-grown vegetables. According to our friends, the OMG appears to have captured an important target audience with the ingenious combination of cooking contests, school cheering competition and celebrity appearances.
We found out that this advocacy is now on its third year and is carried out in various regions and crescendos into a national finals. It has reportedly gained a following at the grassroots level making us wonder why the OMG has for the most part remained unheralded. The rationale and the successes of the project can definitely be a major component of the legacy of the current national leadership in the agriculture and food sectors.
Using a strategy that has wide grassroots and youth appeal, Secretary Yap has successfully raised awareness on the importance of local vegetables in nutrition. The OMG is right on target — young people usually have an aversion to eating vegetables especially in this day and age of fast food and hamburger chains. What Secretary Yap appears to have done was to let the young discover for themselves the nutritional value of vegetables and the creative ways to cook them that makes vegetables interesting and appetizing dinner table fare.
Not only has Secretary Yap coaxed the young to come up with vegetable recipes with amazing ingenuity; he is also apparently raising up a new generation of advocates of increased vegetable consumption. Our media friends told us they marvelled at what young students can create with these food commodity that grow in abundance throughout the country: alugbati vegetable curry, bola-bola veggies delight, kangkong salad in cucumber cups, vegetable terrine, banana wrapsody, Hawaiian vegetable pizza and many more.
We were told there is now an O! May Gulay Recipe book being published by the DA. We hope to get our hands on one soonest.
The view is that Secretary Yap may have set an important precedent: using policy advocacy methods that are, well, fun.
More important, this creative OMG approach may be a key in alleviating the hunger problem. Local vegetables can be grown in backyards and community gardens and many varieties just grow and multiply on their own. They are for the most part easy to cultivate and are resilient to pests and the wrath of typhoons and inundation. We will never run out of them.
We do not wish to put words into Secretary Yap’s mouth, but this advocacy has a positive implication even on our environmental and economic concerns. Come to think of it, if programs like the OMG does raise the consumption of local vegetables significantly, that would give vegetable farmers greater income, reduce foreign exchange use in the importation of food, and boost the greening of the country as more people plant local vegetables.
We do hope whoever succeeds Secretary Yap at the DA continues the OMG.
We can’t help but say that this advocacy is veggie, veggie good.
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