A video recently surfaced showing vegetable vendors spraying water on their produce—using their mouths instead of sprayers. It was not a sight of ingenuity but of utter disregard for hygiene. To spit on the very food that people will bring home to their families is nothing short of alarming.

When one sees carrots, eggplants, and leafy greens glistening with moisture at the market, the first thought is freshness. But after that video, one cannot help but ask: whose breath, whose saliva coats those vegetables? Freshness quickly loses its charm when it dawns on us that the dew-like mist might be droplets from a vendor’s lungs. Suddenly, what was meant to entice becomes a repulsive image of contamination.

Indeed, these vendors are merely trying to keep their goods appealing. Vegetables wilt quickly under the tropical heat, and a dried bunch of pechay will not sell as well as one that looks freshly plucked. Yet their choice of method—substituting a spray bottle with their mouths—is more than just cutting corners. It is a careless gamble with public health. If even one of them carries a communicable disease, every unsuspecting buyer becomes a potential victim.

Diseases do not announce themselves. Coughs can be hidden, infections can be invisible, and carriers may appear perfectly healthy. This is precisely why such practices are dangerous. Saliva is a bodily fluid, and science has long established its role in transmitting illnesses. To pretend that blowing or spraying with the mouth is harmless is to mock common sense itself.

One cannot help but reflect on the golden rule that should guide every human interaction: do not do unto others what you would not want done unto you. Would any of these vendors willingly eat food misted with another person’s saliva? Would they serve such to their own children? It is the most basic appeal to conscience, yet it seems drowned out by the daily desperation of eking out a living.

Some might argue that poverty drives such behavior. Indeed, sprayers cost money, and every peso counts when margins are thin. But cleanliness is not a privilege of the rich; it is a duty that transcends class. A spray bottle costs less than the shame of being exposed to such a degrading practice, and certainly less than the cost of someone falling ill. Sometimes, common sense is cheaper than stinginess.

What makes the matter worse is the silence around it. Buyers walk past, either unaware of the practice or unwilling to confront it. Authorities turn a blind eye, perhaps dismissing it as too trivial a concern compared to larger issues. Yet this is how neglect festers: little things that appear harmless pile up until they form a culture of carelessness, where standards collapse and lives are risked in the name of convenience.

This practice must stop, and it will only stop if people speak up. Information drives change; awareness pushes behavior. Vendors must be told, firmly but patiently, that such shortcuts harm more than they help. Communities must step in to remind them that vegetables symbolize nourishment and life, not contamination. In the end, all it takes is a little conscience, a little common sense, and the humility to accept correction for the sake of the public’s health.

Many of our smallholder farmers in the Philippines still farm the same way their forefathers did several years ago. Traditional farming practices continue to work for some, but new methods can help many substantially improve yields, preserve soil quality, and protect natural resources—thereby supporting the government’s twin goals of attaining food security and increasing farmers’ incomes.

Farmers themselves can be taught innovative practices more effectively with the right information to enhance their knowledge and skills. For instance, advances in satellite mapping and information and communications technologies (ICTs), or the so-called digitization of agriculture, are considered “game changers” that could speed up the transformation of the agricultural landscape in the countryside.

Farming is becoming more precise, resulting in increased productivity. As the country’s population grows by leaps and bounds, agriculture should not stagnate but instead continuously develop new techniques to grow more food in less space while conserving water.

Lettuce production through greenhouse hydroponics is a step toward this goal.
Hydroponics is a system of growing crops without soil, often called soilless farming. Through such technology, plant roots grow in a liquid nutrient solution or in moist inert materials. The liquid nutrient solution is a mixture of essential plant nutrients dissolved in water.

Plant roots are suspended either in a static liquid solution or in a continuously flowing nutrient mixture. The hydroponic growing system requires sustained “tender loving care” (TLC) for the crops, in contrast to traditional farming systems.

It is worth noting that this cutting-edge technology is slowly gaining ground in our region, targeting the youth in urban and peri-urban centers.

In fact, just this June we witnessed the unveiling and ceremonial turnover of a solar-powered hydroponic system inside a school campus in Tacloban City.

It was a victory for the agriculture stakeholders—especially the students, teachers, and surrounding communities of the Tacloban National Agricultural School (TNAS) in Brgy. 94-A, Basper, this city.

This initiative, supported by the Department of Agriculture, aims to help the younger generation adopt modern farming technologies in pursuit of sustainable agriculture and food security.

The government is investing heavily in such agricultural facilities to ensure that more young people are enticed to pursue farming as a vocation. Gone are the days of backbreaking farm chores. By harnessing the potential of the Filipino youth, letting them learn the ropes, and adopting new ways of growing crops, there truly is a glimmer of hope for the future of Philippine agriculture.

WE should not be surprised by this reality. No matter how much we try to keep ourselves clean—physically, mentally, spiritually, etc.—we always manage to get dirty in one way or another, sooner or later. That’s part of our limited and wounded condition here in this world where we are expected to go supernatural from natural, spiritual from the merely material, etc.

We should just learn how to deal properly with this condition, never losing hope since God, our Father, will always understand us and is eager to offer us mercy and whatever else we need to gain our eternal destiny.

We are somehow reminded of this fact of life in that gospel parable where Christ talked about a dishonest steward who, trying to save his employment, had to do some cheating and yet was praised by the master for having the wisdom of the children of the world which is greater than that of the children of light. (cfr. Lk 16,11-13)

Obviously, that parable would give rise to the question of whether God, who must have been personified in some way by the rich man, would just be ok with some cheating, with being dishonest, with being calculating as a leverage for one’s personal gain and interest.
I suppose what the parable is trying to tell and teach us is that Christ is being realistic with our situation in this world. We try to put everything in our life right, clean and moral. But no matter what we do, we would always be hounded by evil and by all kinds of dirt, physical, moral, spiritual.

This parable seems to tell us that we should just learn how to live with this condition and do our best to come out ok in the eyes of God in the end. What may be considered as aggravating circumstance in human justice may be regarded as a saving grace in God’s eyes.

We may have to handle dirt in our life and deal with situations that are fraught with moral irregularities, but as long as we do not compromise what is essential, which is love that comes from God as shown by Christ who became like sin without committing sin (cfr. 2 Cor 5,21), then things will just turn out ok.

In this life, in this world, we just have to be ready to get dirty without compromising what is truly essential in our spiritual life. Evil is unavoidable in this world, and we just have to know how to deal with it, always focused on going toward our eternal destiny with God in heaven.

We should not worry too much about the dirt, because we have been given all the assurances that if we are with God, everything would just turn our right. The challenge now is how to handle the many evil things that will always get mixed up with the essential good of this life and of this world that all come from God.

Evil does not have the last word, unless we let it. It is the good that will have the last word. And so, we just have to learn how to go through such things as cooperating with evil materially, not formally, if only to change things for the better.

We have to learn to distinguish between what is a tolerable cooperation in evil and an intolerable one. With the former, we should feel the obligation to do whatever we can to clean up what is evil in a given situation, system or structure.

So, we have to be ready to properly live this unavoidable condition of our life here where evil and its increasingly powerful structures are sprouting around like mushrooms.