P22 per meal: Fresh definition of comfort

She counted the coins thrice, the way people do when they’re hoping the arithmetic will change if they count it again, and again.

Let’s call her Lorna. We met at a public market last week, her purse open on the counter, a small pile of coins beside it sorted by size. She had ₱P75 for the day. Not for one meal, but for three meals for herself and three children, which works out to something like ₱P25 per meal if you’re generous with the division and cruel with the reality.

She bought a cup of rice, one egg, a sachet of coffee (because she works nights and needs to stay awake), a packet of instant noodles (the cheap kind with the seasoning that never quite dissolves), a small bundle of kangkong, wilted at the edges, marked down because nobody else wanted it; a tomato and a small onion, because flavor is cheaper than meat. The total came to P68. She held the remaining P7 in her hand, folding her fingers over the coins as if they might escape.

At home, she said, she’ll fry the egg and split it. The yolk will go to the youngest, who has gotten thinner lately. She’ll divide the white between the two older children, laying it on top of the rice like a garnish. Then she’ll pour rice into the pan, let it soak up whatever the egg left behind, and eat it standing up over the sink, so no one would notice there was no egg on her plate.

So when her daughter asks, “Ma, kumain ka na (have you eaten)?” She’ll say yes.

And here’s where the government’s numbers come in, with a straight face and a whole lot of explaining to do.

According to the Philippine Statistics Authority’s 2025 Family Income and Expenditure Survey, released on 21 August 2026, the national poverty threshold sits at roughly P96.22 per person per day. That’s about P14,634 a month for a family of five.

Go ever so slightly over that limit, even by just a few pesos borrowed from a neighbor, and suddenly, you’re officially considered nonpoor.

Nonpoor is a strange word! As if by simply changing what you’re called changes the reality of your everyday struggle. You’re being told you’re perfectly healthy when you’re clearly burning with fever.

According to the numbers, you’re no longer poor. But does that mean your landlord will stop badgering you for the rent? Will it suddenly become easier to pay the electric bill? Does your daughter finally get to see a doctor for her cough? Is there suddenly meat on the table at least once a week? Being classified as “nonpoor” on paper doesn’t mean life has suddenly become easier.

Prof. Malou Tiquia did the math that the rest of us were too tired to do and posted it with the kind of sarcasm that only comes from genuine exhaustion.

Twenty-two pesos a meal, three meals a day, comes to P66. Subtract that from the P96.22 threshold, and you’re left with P30.22. Thirty pesos for everything else that day: transport, soap, load, medicine, the inevitable palengke price that went up again. The food threshold of P64 to P66 per person gets sliced into three meals, and each slice is thinner than a sunny-side-up egg white.

How do you buy nutrition with that? How do you buy anything?These macro numbers are an insult to people struggling every day. The economy grew 2.1 percent in the third quarter of 2026, its weakest showing since the fourth quarter of 2009 outside the pandemic years. That’s the fifth straight quarter of slowing growth under this administration.

Citigroup says the country is already in stagflation, or what it calls “slowflation,” with October inflation at 7.8 percent, growth well below historical norms — the highest in Southeast Asia — and unemployment still climbing.

The peso closed at P63.31 to the dollar on 10 November, inching toward its record intraday low of P64.20 and its historic closing low of P64.17 on 27 October.

Public investment is down. Household spending is weakening. And the flood control scandal is still hanging over everything, a multibillion-peso cloud that has made people distrust the very idea of government spending.

So the peso buys less, jobs pay less, prices climb, and the official line is that a family living on P96.22 a day per person has escaped poverty.

That’s not really an honest measure of progress. It’s moving the finish line and pretending everyone has made it.

Lorna didn’t feel nonpoor. She felt the P7 in her fist and the hunger that comes after 2 p.m. She felt her daughter’s question and the lie she gave in answer.

If P22 per meal is the new definition of comfort, then we have stopped measuring poverty and started decorating it.

And the people behind that number and those who agree should try living on it, with a minimum daily wage for a month, and let them count coins until their eyes blur, split an egg into three, make do with soy sauce or salt as viand, and tell their children they’ve already eaten.

Then ask them again who is poor.