The agony of choice

I'm finding it difficult to get immersed in the book I'm currently reading. It's a hefty tome from Edward Rutherfurd, and I get the feeling I need to sit down with it for a decent hour or so to accustom myself to the style before I’m able to absorb the detail whilst reading on a train. I cut my losses after about twenty pages and turned to a copy of the T2 that someone had thoughtfully left on the table in front of me.

The cover of T2 proclaimed that Tesco now sell 38 different types of milk, and raised the question of whether freedom and choice really make us happy. This article got me thinking...

I recalled a time nearly ten years ago when I had just come back from living and traveling in Tanzania. I had been living in remote villages, with meals consisting of various combinations of rice, beans and lentils, occasionally supplemented with fresh fruit or vegetables. Our meal choices were between beans and rice, lentils and rice, beans and lentils, and for a special treat, rice with beans and lentils would be served up. Then for the rest of the week, we would swap the order of the ingredients and have rice with beans instead of beans and rice.

I remember that I dreamed on more than one occasion about manor houses with fine dining halls overflowing with all varieties of meats, fruits, deserts and even cheeses, for which at that time I had no love. Then I would wake up, salivating, under a mosquito net in a canvas shelter sleeping ten other people, with rain beating down on the canvas. The strange thing was, despite having vivid dreams of varied foods, I wasn't aware of being any less happy for want of salt of vinegar crisps. Or any crisps, come to that....

Back in the UK, and back to the reality of sourcing food from a supermarket instead of a weekly market a half day walk away, I felt disorientated and somewhat dismayed by the vast array of foods available. My heart sank as I wandered down aisle after aisle filled with pasta of different shapes, colours and packaging. The meats which were of so regular shapes looked like they had been grown in moulds. The aisle which totally overwhelmed me was the one with the beverages. After six months of drinking chlorinated water, I could only stare in bewilderment at the sheer number of different types of orange squash. It was sickening to me that such disparities should exist. I couldn't articulate the sense of injustice I felt, so instead did the only sensible thing under the circumstances and burst into tears.

People stared. A lady asked if I was OK. I didn't quite know if I was. I suppose I wasn't really OK, yet had anyone asked why I was crying, I wouldn't have had much of an answer beyond telling them as they could well see for themselves that there were twenty different types of orange squash.

There were many incidents that brought me to the brink of tears while I was in Tanzania. One that I recall was triggered by the disparity in the level of choice that individuals could exercise. A young lad had cautiously approached me as I sat on top of a large boulder in a broad plain at the bottom of the village writing my diary. I had initially noticed him when he was some distance away, keeping a watchful eye over his herd of perhaps 40 cows. Over the course of the next hour, they wandered generally in my direction, and eventually the lad climbed the boulder and sat near me. I greeted him, and we got chatting. He was 18, as was I at that time. His family had 38 cows, which he herded for 6 hours every day. He'd stopped going to school when he was 12, as his parents couldn't afford to pay the fees, and consequently he couldn't get a job, not that there were any jobs available in the village. The nearest employment was in town, 2 days’ walk away, hardly commutable. He would have to move to town for a job, and that was impossible - he was needed to herd the cows.

I was quiet. He wandered off the boulder to follow his herd. I sat thinking about my brother, who had recently graduated from Cambridge. When he was 18, he wasn't herding cows. He had a world of opportunity and choice at his feet. Not only did he have plenty to eat, he had a choice of what to eat. Able to choose what to do with his days. So much choice, and this lad had almost none, though judging by the smile on his face, he had made at least one choice. He seemed to have chosen to be happy. I watched him wander off into the distance, blurred by the tears in my eyes. I wasn't sure why I was crying, but I did wonder whether any of the possessions in my backpack or the choices I would have the agony of pondering in future actually had any impact on how likely I was to be happy.

And so back to the 38 different types of milk which Tesco are selling. I suspect that if they only sold one variety, the type which came out of cows, it wouldn’t bother me. I would probably buy it. I would probably stick it in my tea. And I would probably get used to it and proclaim to like the taste of it after a few weeks, yes, even if it was the banana flavored variety. I also suspect that my levels of happiness would be unaffected if for the rest of my life, I was only permitted one shape of pasta. I would however prefer that my food choices were more varied than choosing two from rice, beans and lentils, and that if I wasn't too keen on cows, I could choose
another manner in which to earn my living. 

So, how much choice is too much, or too little? I can't decide - you choose.