Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

crunchy numbers FFCC food manufacture UK economy
What can £38/week buy?
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The impact of Government policy to improve the national diet comes with proportionally higher costs for poor households. This would apply to any government, of any stripe and any motivation. Structural change in food policy throws differences in earnings into sharp relief. When the Food Standards Agency published the Eatwell Guide in 2016, a headline price rise of £38 a week would mean a doubling in food bills for poor households, compared to increases of just over a third for affluent consumers. Using Eatwell data on a national scale, the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) researchers calculate that legislating for a healthy, sustainable national diet would come with a £57 billion price tag. This is not unreasonable, indeed it is good value, given that the direct cost of healthcare arising from diet-related illness is running at £91 billion, lost productivity is costing the economy an estimated £116 billion a year and the human cost a further 60 billion a year. The numbers basically accuse the food industry of being more interested in making money than feeding people. However, the scale and scope of the money extracted from UK health authorities by pharmaceutical corporations is several orders of magnitude greater and no less reprehensible.

If the market economy functions as one might have hoped, would this ever have occurred in the first place? Part of the problem with economics is that its practitioners quite cheerfully play “what if?” games as they go along. The problem is not that a variable might be unreliable, but that the outcome can change in so many ways that it is impossible to attribute a given outcome with a single input. Treating the food/health sectors as a series of events, for example, creates a dislocated view of the biosphere, with more gaps than development. Some gaps are inevitable, but you can have too much of a good thing.

FFCC
Upward pressure on food prices
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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.

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Process of elimination
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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.

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Big Food’s Big Secret
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The UK government spends more than GBP 90 billion a year treating chronic food-related illness, according to the Food, Farming & Countryside Commission (FFCC). Researchers estimate that investing half that sum would be enough to make a healthy diet accessible to everyone living in the British Isles. The full extent of the damage caused to the UK economy by a dysfunctional food sector is GBP 268 billion pounds a year, taking lost productivity and early mortality into account, FFCC warns.

The Food, Farming & Countryside Commission is an independent charity, set up in 2017 to inform and extend public involvement in ongoing discussions about food and farming. Using government data as a starting point, FFCC argues that it would be significantly cheaper to produce healthy food in the first place. More to the point, it is not an option to go on footing the bill for damaged public health resulting from the commercial sector’s activities. There is simply not enough money in the kitty and time is running out. 

Researchers took into account government estimates of productivity and lost earnings arising from chronic illnesses. These indirect costs are borne by a range of actors in the economy, such as local government departments. Such costs are real expenditure, but the total figure is not recorded as a single aggregate figure. When combined with the initial figures, the result is a more imposing figure and looks like figure S1.

The direct costs (in red) are existing government data; indirect costs (in orange) indicate the economic impact associated with the prevailing levels of unemployment and early mortality. Like the submerged part of an iceberg, we ignore these costs at our peril.

Working with indirect costs opens the door to accusations of misinterpretation, but economists have worked hard to establish methods that can avoid serious pratfalls. Healthcare is supported by a wide range of funding sources, from government down to private individuals. The money is real enough, even when it comes from private individuals. It just becomes harder to count. There are times when budgets for nearby or related units will be skimmed to meet ad hoc requirements. Welcome to the economists’ underworld, where early retirement due to ill health is just another negative variable.