From Pandesal to Oil: Two Ways of Earning

Every morning along our street on Misericordia, near Panganiban in Naga City, a familiar voice glides ahead of the day. It comes from a sound system mounted on a humble tricycle, looping like a gentle alarm clock: “Yaon na po, malunggay pandesal, masarap na, mainit pa.”

Since the pandemic, it has made its rounds faithfully, announcing not just bread but routine—proof that mornings still arrive, warm and reliable.

The pandesal on wheels now crisscrossing Naga City and much of Camarines Sur traces its roots to Masbate, another poor Bicol province. As early as 2019, before the pandemic, pandesal makers there began teaching one another how to bake and sell bread from rolling tricycles. Now they have penetrated every town and city not only in Bicol but Mindanao and the Visayas. According to Arnel Daitol of Camaligan, it was—and remains—a collective struggle. Vendors wake at 4:00 a.m. to mix dough, bake through the dark, load bread by sunrise, and sell until sundown. It is poverty resisted the hard, honest way, learned neighbor to neighbor, without fanfare or guarantees.

The tricycle rolls by with its small glass-fronted case, shelves layered with hot pandesal. Steam fogs the panes. Today’s batch is flecked green—malunggay folded into the dough—each roll hiding a small cube of cheese that softens when torn open. You smell it before you see it: yeast, butter, warmth, comfort. It is food that answers a simple human need.

That morning, I was supposed to be writing my Bicol Mail column on a post–New Year event—the U.S. attack on Venezuela over the weekend of January 3. But the repeated taped call of the pandesal vendor outside caught my attention, and my hunger.

Suddenly, the contrast was unavoidable.

Here was the most immediate need of the moment: hot bread promised honestly and delivered by hand. And there was Venezuela—its oil coveted from afar, wealth pursued not by making something, but by taking control of what already exists.

From Pandesal to Oil: Two Ways of Earning, Two Moral Worlds. That felt like the right frame.

From our window, I watched the vendor steady his rolling store. Long before most of the city wakes, he has already worked for hours. The pandesal worker rises in darkness to mix flour, yeast, water, and effort into dough. By sunrise, the bread is baked, loaded, and sold street by street. Income is uncertain but bigger than most on average. Weather, competition, and appetite decide the day. But the labor is real. What he earns comes directly from sweat, skill, and time.

This is money made the hardest way: by producing something useful and offering it to the community. It is the quiet story behind the hundreds—now thousands—of pandesal vendors across Naga, Bicol, and the country. They do not speculate. They do not extract. They work, sell, and hope.

Now place this beside another way money is made.

When powerful states or corporations intervene in countries like Venezuela to control oil resources, wealth is generated not through personal labor but through power—over land, politics, and people’s futures. Oil is not created by those who profit most from it. It already exists beneath the ground. Control is gained through sanctions, economic pressure, political manipulation, or force. Risks are pushed downward to ordinary citizens; profits flow upward and outward.

You may say this is getting political. It isn’t. It’s economics—and morality.

The pandesal vendor creates value from almost nothing. Flour becomes bread. Bread becomes breakfast. If no one buys, there is no income. Risk is personal. Dignity lies in work. Resource exploitation works the opposite way. Wealth comes from appropriation rather than production. What is taken is not just oil, but a people’s ability to decide how their resources should shape their own future.

Both are called “earning,” but they do not belong to the same moral universe. The pandesal worker takes nothing from anyone else to live. No community is displaced. No sovereignty weakened. His success depends on trust and mutual need. The bread feeds the neighborhood. The other feeds an appetite that is never full—driven by an energy-hungry global system now scrambling for supply, with Venezuela’s vast heavy crude reserves once again in its sights.

If we truly value hard work, we must be honest about what counts as work. Getting up at dawn to bake bread is work. Rolling through the streets for small change is work. Rearranging global systems so wealth flows from the weak to the powerful is extraction. It is foreign intervention.

The voice calling “malunggay pandesal, mainit pa” reminds us of a moral economy we understand instinctively: you earn by contributing. If we want a just world, we should listen more closely to that sound in the morning—and be far more critical of the silence that follows when a nation’s resources are taken in the name of profit.