What a totally different world we would inhabit if food and drink were not the basic necessities of human life.
A world without agriculture, a world without regular trips to the vegetable or meat market, a world without restaurants and fast food joints, a world without cooking.
No need for fridges, freezers, microwaves, ovens, juicers, toasters, kettles, even tea pots and, those all to dominant multi-nationals would never have had the chance to raise their ugly heads, well, at least not in respect of the food market but they would probably still have gone to town, city, country, whatever in other fields of enterprise.
However, eat and drink we must but at what cost? Most of it totally unnecessary too. Advertising, in all its many shapes and forms, drums into even the most unwary of us the need to have, the need to be able to perform kitchen tasks quickly, the need to eat whatever products they have been paid to hype up at the moment.
People, men and women equally, rush out to purchase the latest gadget to hit the scene, denting the family budget time and time again. They just must have, must be able to show off to relatives, must keep up with fashion.
Is something like an electric, automatic bread maker, for example, a basic household need? Coming in at around Rs10,000, if not more, once you have fed into it the correct amount of flour, yeast, water and whatever else you may like to add for flavour, then you simply switch it on and count the minutes to freshly baked, aromatic bread. Mmmm, nothing like it. But, the price and the unreliable electricity supply, to say nothing of how much bread, with even less hassle, you can buy for this amount of money, does not make this a financially viable proposition at all. Fresh bread, made by hand, is not all that problematic to turn out once you’ve got the hang of it and not all that time consuming either.
Exhausted after a full day’s work, no energy to cook let alone go to the market and find something to cook first, then people head, increasingly, for the high priced, cardboard food at fast food joints.
How come, by the way, what the infuriating waiter/waitress hands to you bears no resemblance at all to the pictures on the larger than life posters hung all over the place? One can quite understand the reaction of the film character played by Michael Douglas in that, by current measures, “vintage” movie Falling Down! If you have decided on chicken for dinner why on earth pay gold dust for highly advertised nuggets, not even enough of them to wet your appetite, when, if you must eat out, a “desi” restaurant, kebab seller or similar “hole-in-the-wall” eatery will give you far more and better tasting food for your hard earned cash?
Food fashion. To be seen at such places, to be carrying cartons from the same, each carton and bag highly emblazoned with a logo, advertising on your legs and continuing to advertise in the gutter where millions of such items end up, seems to take precedence over good food sense.
Hand in hand with over the top food and drink promotions comes obesity, heart disease, high cholesterol, high this and high that.
The number of sickingly obese youngsters, world wide not just here in Pakistan, has increased in leaps and bounds since the advent of fast food and other “gimmicks”.
It seems that the “uniform” of youngsters from certain segments of society is not complete, despite designer made or imitation designer made clothes, without the addition of fast food accessories. A ketchup dripping burger or bag of chips, a carton of something undescribable and almost unedible, a bottle of fizz to be consumed wherever the kid, or adult, happens to be. Yuk!
Enjoying a leisurely, family meal at the dining table seems to be a thing of the past, one hates to think of future trends if the present is anything to measure by.
Careful housewives can yell and scream at their offspring all they like. The offspring will, in the majority of cases, completely fail to understand why they, in their eyes, should be denied the heady pleasures of fashionable foods, foods which if they don’t eat, may leave them outlawed by their friends and compatriots and, even worse, labelled as “too poor to purchase”. The food game, in today’s terms, is really just that but not a game that anyone other than big businesses and advertising companies can win. Going with the flow, flowing with the crowd and eating with them too will win nothing but an empty pocket and bad health.
Is it really so impossible to make better, more nutritious food at home?
Ironically, Pakistani cuisine is, quite often, the fast food of the western nations which are currently duping us with their tasteless products and formulas. Surely this says far more than fashionable advertising!
