FOOD
A shop in Surat is selling a sweet that costs a fortune amidst the Kerala flood crisis. Should purchasing power alone determine human choices?
Dhriti Kapoor is a Food Ethnographer based in Los Angeles.
A sweet shop in Surat reportedly has begun selling a gold leaf covered sweet which is priced at Rs 9000/kg.
The shopkeeper reportedly told a news agency that he had received a tremendously positive response from the customers. He also asserted that the demand for such exotic sweets enhanced during the festive season and a lot of customers awaited the time and purchased the sweet in bulk quantities. He also added that consuming gold provided several health benefits and health conscious consumers preferred this sweet. How brutally inhuman can our behavior be?
How can we forget the thousands of people going without food and water, having lost their loved ones and families in the Kerala catastrophe? On one hand we are being constantly made aware of the situation in Kerala through images in mainstream media and social networking websites and yet we choose to remain distant and instead splurge in buying such exotic and even absurdly priced edibles? I may be told by most adherents of market economy that if an individual can afford the sweet or any marketable commodity for that matter, they are entitled the free choice to consume it.
I have felt that the market has become a primary educator for the large number of masse, who have bowed down their heads (and given up their own creative agency) before the oppressive and compulsively ordained market culture. Just because I have the purchasing power do I have to buy something? What are the other significant and meaningful ways in which a resource as important as money can be utilised?
We are human primarily because we have intellect and creative agency, we are not the mere slave of circumstances but we know what is appropriate and what is unjust. While orphaned children cry alone in stranded homes, the sick die without adequate medical support, men, women and children starve for days before rescue teams reach them, thousands of animals drown in pain, and thousands of acres of land are wasted forever- how can we be so inhuman?
It is time to think whether celebrations can be so obscenely conceptualised, is one person’s happiness demarcated from the other’ s in a way that all human sensibilities can be compromised?
It is time to think on the way we allow external forces to blunt our creativity. A sweet that can be shared in celebration no matter how ordinary its ingredients, is far sweeter than one which is made and sold at the cost of other people’s agonies.
