Urban Food Chains is going through a reset with a jolt from the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) study The False Economy of Big Food.
They still don’t get it…
Amazingly, there are still folk around Britain who have failed to grasp the meaning of the words”third country”, let alone why it matters. The Centre for Inclusive Trade reports a 16% drop in British food exports to the EU and is calling for concessions that would be unfair to other third countries. There isn’t a cat in hell’s chance of the European Commission doing a special deal for a former member state that opted to become a third country.
Upward pressure on food prices
There is no way that food prices can be expected to go down anytime soon, whatever market watchers predict. There is a quaint notion that supermarkets live like church mice, dedicated to fighting a selfless battle for ever lower prices for the consumer. It is no more than a quaint notion (here is a link to an earlier item on this topic). The reality is closer to a shark-infested reef that tears the keels off passing ships when the tide is right, leaving rich pickings for the sharks.
FFCC economists need to retrieve Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth to continue. Having said that indirect data is hard to stand up, it is time to attempt this, anyway. The distinguishing feature of supermarket buying departments is that they have complete control on costs and margins. They do not need to be over-concerned about whose pocket they dip into: a supplier is as good as a consumer for this purpose. More on this anon.
The cornerstone of the FFCC analysis is that there is a sustainable price for a healthy diet; this could be realised through savvy investment, with luck. This is the figure at the heart of the study, which does not leave scope for prevaricating. Once the government is satisfied that unhealthy diet and chronic disease are linked, there is an urgent need to act first and reflect on whether it was necessary later on. The chances of doing much more than scratching the surface of a national public health disaster are slim to the point of non-existence. We can no longer afford to talk of future health crises when the one we are in at the moment has been building momentum for years.
Nobody doubts that modern diet is overloaded with sugar, saturated fats, short on fresh produce and fibre, as well as being laced with toxic residues. Far from being a marginal issue, the growing proportion of Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in the UK’s adult diet is 57%, while two thirds (66%) UK adolescents’ diet is based on UPFs. For years, the food industry has driven its growth by selling increasingly unhealthy products. The scale of the problem has not been confronted in time to make a difference: rather, it has been milked to fill the boots of the UK’s food industry leaders. Only now is the British public beginning to wake up to the scale of the problem. It may well be too late to save more than a sparse handful of those trusting souls who never made the connection between years of poor diet and chronic illness.
Process of elimination
If there is so much money at stake, how strong is the case for accusing food manufacturers of Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs) of wilful distortion? The arrival of wall to wall processed foods in British aisles in postwar years has been accompanied by rising numbers of patients needing treatment for heart disease and diabetes. While the nation gorges on sugar, salt and saturated fats, there is a drop in foods that bring whole grains, let alone fruit and vegetables. Processing very finely divided ingredients allows fertilisers and other toxic residues to spread downstream through the food chain. More worrying is the uptake of UFPs in the population. These foods now account for 57% of the adult diet and 66% of adolescent food intake. The health issues in later life are already filling up British hospitals and soak up two thirds of the health budget.