Japanese Home About Back issues ⌄ Notes from the Field Packaged Food, Packaged Life: Corporate Food in Metro Manila Slums Newsletter No.81 2024-01-10 Heriberto Ruiz Tafoya (Political Economy) The purpose of this article is to present the relevant contributions of the book Packaged Food, Packaged Life: Corporate Food in Metro Manila Slums to an audience composed of academics, activists, government ofﾘcials and any other social actors who frequently interact with slums [1] in the Philippines, Southeast Asia or other countries in the Global South. The book itself has three main objectives: The ﾘrst is to make clear why dozens of food brands—in sachets, bottles, cans and other packaging—are sold in all market spaces in Metro Manila’s slums. The intention, however, is to provide an answer that goes beyond those general explanations that claim that people simply consume them because they can afford them or that this is a result of individual lifestyle choices. Speciﾘcally, I argue that the abundant consumption of corporate brands in slums is the result of historical circumstances in which constrained living conditions and limited opportunities for people to ﾙourish as human beings