Yummy!  There’s a Whole Foods Market in Stoke Newington.  That consumed an hour yesterday afternoon.  And about 50 quid.  The excitement mounted as I meandered through that bastion of American food and health branding.  Dare I admit to titillation at the prospect of real pretzels and something besides mayo-based sauce to put on a salad?  Or Mexican style salsas that aren’t made by Old El Paso, which seems to be the only brand sold in Britain, which is like having 65 million people who think the Ford Fiesta is the only car in the world.

Part of the WFM experience involved discovering Kallo Low Fat Rice Cakes.  Think about that for a moment.  Low fat rice cake.  That’s not exactly the same thing as a low fat English breakfast.  The label boasted 0.2g of fat.  What do you figure, that’s down from 0.3 grams?  Maybe 0.4g?  (Just for comparison sake, a rather basic version of a Full English boasts about 400 times more fat).  Oh, and a pack of Kallo’s Low Fat Rice Cakes costs £7.64, which is only slightly less than the price of platinum on the basis of weight.  People are willing to pay for health.

Our visit to Whole Foods Market came just after getting lost in Abney Park Cemetery, a hidden gem that’s part graveyard and part medieval forest.  Reading the 19^th C gravestones there, it’s hard not to remark the ordinariness of children or young adults dying.  Cut to 20 years ago:  walking through Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans, digesting the significance of family headstones with three or four children perished within a stretch of three weeks.  Makes you realize how far removed many of us have become from the reality of the human condition being nasty, brutish and short.

In the chasm between “haves” and “have nots”, we can conjure many dividing lines:  The digital divide, the education divide, the life expectancy divide.  Yet I find it hard to imagine a deeper division than the one in which the “haves” side includes a chunk of people suffering panic attacks over the fat content of a rice cake.  The luxury of that effort, the obsessive nature of that fear, the idiosyncrasy of that market all point to a rarefied environment, to say the least.

So we must ask:  How many of us shoppers at Whole Foods think of ourselves as rarefied (read: nutters) as opposed to normal arbiters of healthy living?  How close is that luxury/obsession/idiosyncrasy to those who hold power in the humanitarian business?  And how far removed is it from the world of the beneficiary?  What does this gap say about the values underlying aid programs dealing with health?  We must ask these questions because the removal – the distance – is not so easily contained to the many absurd disparities between a society in which hunger is a permanent and defining ache and one in which people study the labels of organic yoghurt as if reading the instructions to defuse a bomb.

No, the distance here is generated by the value assigned to health and, perhaps, to life itself.  It is that value – the hyperinflation of health – which underpins our worrying about the fat content of aerated rice flour.  We come from societies “evolving” to the point where the minute risk of ill health or injury prompts such overly protective behaviour as the baby helmet or the craze for umbilical cord banking.  Here lies a fundamental disjunction between medical humanitarian and beneficiary, one largely invisible to us.  How else to describe our obsession with their health; with our overweening valuation of their health more than their own valuation of it?

OK.  We live in a different world. I guess my question is the degree to which we unwittingly export our world, or impose it; to which we remain blind to our way not being the only way.

When Somali elders prefer a cataract surgery clinic to primary healthcare for their community, do we listen to their request or overrule their unenlightened undervaluation of the health of a two-year-old?  When a Sudanese woman runs a risk by not bringing her child to the clinic, what is our reaction?  Do we question our own alarm at that minimal risk?  Or do we construct an entire narrative of victimhood, where she is forced to make such a “bad” choice in order to collect firewood or care for her other children?  Or do we construct a narrative of her ignorance, where she doesn’t understand the consequences of her own actions?  We export, in other words, our valuation of risk.  Will the humanitarians of the future insist she walk three hours to pick up her baby helmet?

When a Zimbabwean man refuses to wear condoms or stop visiting prostitutes, what is our reaction to his running the risk of catching/spreading AIDS?  Do we accept his choice or, again, construct an idea of his ignorance?  More importantly, do we even register our imposition and increasingly commercial marketing of biological longevity as some sort of universal right?  Do we recognize in ourselves the front men of a pharmaceutical industry whose wet dream is a world population sucking down as many pills as we do?  What of his response to our attempts at steering him on the right path; at our incessant moral hectoring and ever-so-repetitive educational demand that he change his behaviour?  Some days, I think we miss his response altogether:  “Hey, you, loosen up.  Chill out.  Eat some deep-fried food.  Live a little!”