Spoilt for choice

As a child my family's menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it. Buddy Hackett

Choice is a luxury - well I am talking about practical choices, not philosophical ones. The overwhelming majority of people in the world today have no choice. They cannot choose what they eat, where they live, what they wear. But almost everyone in the developed world - even those at the bottom of society do have at least some choice, although, of course, the lower down the social strata you are, the more limited your choices are.

I think this post began as yet again I was trying to decide what to cook for dinner, when it occurred to me that this was a very middle-class and indulgent thing to do. There are so many people who cannot choose what they eat - they eat rice every day, or yams, or whatever it is that is basic and marginally nourishing and grown by their family. We watched Interstellar again the other day and there was a scene in that in which the family was eating corn - because that was all that was left to grow on earth. Whether this is at all plausible is beside the point - the Irish potato famine after all was a direct result of a single agricultural product. As I have now said at least twice, much of the world's population does not have that choice. So agonising over what to eat for dinner is basically decadent.

We also watched a new German series on SBS set in the 80s - Deutschland 83, in which a young East German soldier, recruited under pressure to spy for his masters, is sent to Bonn, where we see him in a supermarket facing a wall of fruit from which to choose. And this is what we privileged people have all the time - just look at the picture above - a bit extreme I will admit, but only a little. We can not only choose between different varieties of the basics of life but also between a range of luxuries and downright unnecessary things. Remember that lovely ad in which the lady in the milk bar recites a list of at least a dozen different types of milk? It sums it all up really as she gets to the truly 'out there' kinds of milk. Like all those things in the Aldi health food catalogue. And the young East German was seen in a later scene tackling a bar of Toblerone with a look of wonder on his face.

So stop complaining about whether the supermarkets are restricting your choices and just appreciate how much we have, and how much we do not need.

I think I have more to say on this subject and will come back to it tomorrow. Today I am feeling tired and have lost the thread of what it was I wanted to truly say.