Ang Nutribun...Bow.

a battle is raging in facebook and other social media platforms, its a battle between those who are against the revisionism of martial law history and those who peddle this revision or should i say those who are claiming martial law years was a golden era of the Philippines and we should forget the bad things about it and move on. and one of the things i noticed about their assertion is the lowly yet important part of my elementary years, the nutribun. the assertion goes like this, "mabuti pa noong panahon ni marcos may pinamimigay na nutribun" or a variation of this assertion. this made me laugh, not because of the claim but of the nutribun itself. first its not free, when i started elementary nutribun was 10 centavos, if you want something in it, butter or margarine you add 5 centavos so that's 15 centavos all in all. that's not free. what i remember about nutribun is its texture, its a little bit coarse and does not smell bread at all. you really have to put butter or margarine in it to be able to chomp it down. my classmates and i used to play with it throwing pieces of the bread at each other during recess, we are forced to buy it or we cannot get out of the classroom during recess, that's what mrs. cruz (our grade 1 teacher) say, so everybody buys so we can get out and play with the nutribun. so how did this nutribun get into my elememtary life? who thought of feeding elementary children with a coarse bread? i did a little research to find out how did this bread became part of my elementary years. it turned out that it was a project of USAID from 1959-1967 but was revived in 1972 due to high malnutrition rate among children in the Philippines, malnutrition is a product of poverty. Marcos was already the president of the Philippines during those times and was planning of extending his term, which is a violation of the constitution, so the only way to do it was by declaring martial law. but that's not my topic, my topic is was the Marcos era the golden years of the Philippines? the USAID project run from 1959-1967, Marcos became the president of the Philippines in 1966, so by the time he's second term was about to end malnutrition in the Philippines was worse that by 1972 the last year of his term he has to revive it and declare martial law. if Marcos era was a golden year for the Philippines how come malnutrition is high that a foreign project on stemming malnutrition has to be revived? the answer is it was not a golden era, it was a rusting steel coated with gold paint era to hide the reality that Philippines was suffering during the Marcos rule.

usaid project:  http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/Pnaag927.pdf