The price of food
Clare Hargreaves
Did you eat a ham
sandwich for lunch
today?
If so, was it one you made
yourself from traditionally
cured, free-range British ham,
and bread crafted by your local
artisan baker? Or was it a wrapped
supermarket sarnie filled with reconstituted
Danish ham at a third of the cost?
We make such choices every day. If we want it,
there’s food to be had at some incredibly low
prices. Since food production was industrialised
after World War II, cheap food has become an
unalienable right, fuelled by the tooth-and-nail
rivalry between the supermarkets.
As a proportion of our income, we’ve never spent
less. Less than 10% of the average UK household
spend goes on food, compared to 25% just after
the war. That leaves a lot more to spend on cars,
flat-screen TVs and smartphones. Oddly, when
buying electronic gadgetry quality is
paramount, but when it comes to
the food we put in our
mouths, it often isn’t. We
just want it cheap.
So should we be paying
more for our food?
Phrased thus, debate can
quickly degenerate into
pointless class warfare. At a
time when prices of some
foods are rocketing, how
many of us would ask to – or
feel able to – pay more? We’re
only human.
The real issue is that most of the
cheap food we buy actually has a
very high price. There’s no cheap
lunch, in other words. The bargain
pineapple you just bought in the
supermarket for a quid probably
earned the Central American worker
who picked it a measly 4p. They may
also have incurred health problems
Diet & Health Today
as a result of spraying the fruit with up to 16
different chemicals to ensure long shelf life.
It’s not just other people who pay the price of our
cheap food, but animals, wildlife, landscapes –
and our own health and quality of life. It’s the
chicken that cannot walk because it is forced to
grow at record speed to keep its retail price under
a fiver. It’s the fields of plastic that disfigure
swathes of our countryside to produce fruit
cheaply virtually all year. It’s the thousand-cow,
zero-grazing factory farms that are in danger of
becoming the only way to survive as a dairy farm.
It’s the artisan Somerset Cheddar-maker
struggling in the face of imports of bland, factorymade Canadian ‘cheddar’. It’s our health – and
our hospitals – as cheap processed foods tend to
be packed with refined carbohydrates and fats
that make us obese. It’s the corn buntings and
grey partridges flushed off intensive farms
using agrichemicals that destroy
the birds’ foods.