Profusion

Both yesterday and today we've been a bit late getting home after I've picked Noi up from the office as she's been doing bits of shopping for stuff she needs in order to do the cooking etc. for this Saturday's open house. Today we were at the market at Geylang Serai doing the necessary. I was struck by how much more I enjoyed being there than, say, shopping at Giant at Parkway Parade. There's profusion at the market but a kind of natural abundance. In big supermarkets, and Giant is nothing if not big, I increasingly have a sense that we're bleeding the world dry and packaging it for unnecessary consumption. Very puritanical of me, I know, and more than a little judgmental in tone, but I don't mean it that way. Rather I'm trying to describe a genuine feeling of dis-ease.

This ties in, in my mind, with material I'm noticing more and more regarding a kind of epidemic of obesity. I don't think we're built for this kind of abundance. It's overwhelming for many to the extent that self-harm becomes predictable. Commercial pressures to partake of the abundance are relentless: it's the logic of the market. I remember this time last year in a meeting in the school I used to teach in feeling a sense of hopelessness listening to ideas for a healthy eating campaign. The Head of Department responsible was lamenting our inability to really do very much about the obesity rates among the kids and wondering why it was so. I pointed out that we hadn't a fraction of the advertising budget of one or two of the more famous fast food chains. Game over, I'm afraid.

We were watching Downsize Me last night, a rather nifty, cheerful sort of diet and exercise progamme that airs on the Health & Home channel. It featured two rather jolly overweight ladies from Australia making a valiant effort to shed the kilos. I was struck by the fact that the ladies, though grossly obese (I'm using the medical classification here) did not look particularly unusual. There are lots of folk of the same build to be seen. Sad. A feeling of ruined lives.