Just a glance at the re-vamped nature of the marketing strategies employed in grocery stores across North America is enough for one to become grossly aware that “being health-conscious” is the new big thing to infect popular consciousness. Whether it’s the belief that drinking green tea will increase the longevity of one’s life or the opinion of health professionals who advise the average person to consume eight glasses of water a day, it’s evident that health-consciousness is currently the obsession of the cultures of many countries.
Now more than ever, media outlets, hospitals and doctor’s offices are prescribing the latest treatments to individuals hoping to achieve the healthiest vessel of their dreams. From partaking in cleansing rituals to undergoing weight loss, it appears as though the ultimate end of human beings is being gradually re-routed towards achieving the best health possible. While being healthy is almost as entrenched into contemporary popular culture as a movie star’s concern with his/ her public image is, it’s interesting to note that this form of health-consciousness has yet to reach to the ears of many individuals south of the equator. Though maintaining the sustenance of one’s body is of almost paramount concern to many in the western world, in many other parts of the globe, health consciousness often translates into surviving on enough wholesome foods for the day.
The divergence in conceptual thinking on this issue is of interest to someone like myself: I was brought up and raised in the West have been trained to eat and live “smart”. “Smart” here applies directly to what I have been taught at various levels of schooling, which is to say living an active lifestyle where I would always be motivated to choose foods containing nutritional goodness over foods of pleasurable goodness.
After partaking in various trips to my home country of Bangladesh, what I often came to find was that eating “healthy” meant eating enough to induce a radiant glow in one’s skin. In Bangladesh, where much of citizenry lives below the poverty line, daily food sources are often as hard to come by as a four leaf clover with bright magenta flecks. This accords with the opinion of my own mother who, after being brought up in Bangladesh, thinks that the people in the west are “positively nuts” since all they care about, or at least all that the media makes them out to care about, is the maintenance of a healthy body. (This is precisely why there is neither margarine nor olive oil in my household, only pure butter and canola oil.)
Therein lies my question to all of you TIG users out there on the internet: is there more than just a conceptual divergence in the way people around the world think about health consciousness?
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