Walk into any store today, even the university Convenience Store, and look for the health food section. Greens and browns will dominate; with words such as organic, natural and pure everywhere, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’re at a 1960s hippie revival convention.

Look closer, though, and the price tags will be double what one would pay for the non-organic flour, the unnatural confectionary and the impure bath soap. We take this for granted. Of course the products that take more time, eschew mass production and are made in Norway rather than Malaysia are going to cost more, but what are we paying for? In this aisle or this section, we’re paying for the healthy option, the one that won’t give us cancer and that won’t poison the earth.

All this is well and good — who wouldn’t pay a little bit more if it meant that a river wasn’t going to acidify, or you’re not going to get cancer? Well, some people can’t pay that little bit more. When your budget for buying these products is constrained, organic produce might seem nice, but savings are more important.

Indeed, if you’re socioeconomically disadvantaged, it’s much more likely that you’re not going to live anywhere near a Wholefoods or a farmers’ market. Many people who might be working multiple jobs, or working and studying at the same time, will be too poor to cook a meal and may have to revert to a cheaper fast food option. By encouraging the purchase of healthy and more expensive foods, are we stigmatizing those who may not be able to afford these foods as perennially unhealthy?

When you’re buying GMO-free, biodynamic produce, you’re avoiding a product that may have been engineered to produce more off a small land area. There may not even be any benefit to buying the organic product over another. Even worse, it may be justifying the purchase of a product that shouldn’t be grown in that area in the first place. How appropriate is it to buy particularly thirsty crops in an age in which droughts are lasting longer and occurring with more frequency? Does it really help to buy the organic cotton shirt, or biodynamic rice?

As we’ve seen with greenwashing, products that are more environmentally friendly don’t save the world, and instead we’re told to feel better about buying more, as if we can buy our way out of climate change.

But we all tried that in the 2000s and nothing changed. Now we should focus on ourselves — let’s buy more to stay healthy.

Think about what counts as a healthy meal. Half a plate of vegetables, a quarter protein and a quarter carbs. But no matter how many times you show a well-rounded meal to someone or describe the calorie count in a McDonald’s burger, it won’t change the economic reality that foods described as healthy are more expensive and out of the reach for many people.

Continuing to pathologize those who suffer from obesity, which is more prevalent in poorer communities, disguises the lack of options available to those on lower incomes. Arguing for healthy eating as an imperative, both for the individual and the body of the state, makes those who cannot afford to consume this way sick.

Food is possibly the most obvious symptom of the classist implications of a healthy lifestyle discourse. However, it extends further. When we move from healthy eating to a healthy lifestyle, the discourse is even more discriminatory. We’re told to exercise for 30 minutes every day. For those who are disadvantaged, it can be hard to find the time to go for a 30-minute run, let alone pay for a gym membership or athletic apparel. These imperatives placed upon individuals, who do not have the time or economic power to comply with them, leads to those who have less monetary resources being ostracized from the healthy society.

Finally, and possibly most significantly, the cost of health services makes them prohibitive for those on lower incomes. Services that are not covered by one’s private or public health insurance become extremely expensive, if one even has health insurance. Couched in the discourse of medical certainty, the requirements that are placed upon individuals to avail themselves of these services and their subsequent inability to pay for them leaves these people unable to stay healthy in the eyes of a society that is obsessed with the functioning of the collective body.

We should shift our focus away from ways in which to encourage individuals to make healthy choices, such as buying organic food, exercising daily and using preventative medicine, to instead look at what makes some people unhealthy in the first place. More often than not, those who are unhealthy are already hampered by their socioeconomic standing, and the constant bleating of public health campaigns will do nothing to assuage this.