The Food Foundation has been claiming that healthy food is insanely expensive again. Their latest factoid is that it costs £8.80 per 1,000 calories!
There are two problems with this, or at least with the Food Foundation’s interpretation of it. The first is the use of averages. Aside from the questionable use of the median rather than the mean average, the average price of various foods has little practical relevance to people who go shopping. It is certainly possible to spend stupid money on sun-dried tomatoes, exotic fruit, bags of salad and anything with the word “organic” on it. Supermarkets provide many options for the health-conscious consumer who has more money than sense, and they all help to lift the average. But the existence of a wide range of expensive healthy food does not mean that “low-income families are being priced out of being able to afford to eat healthily”, as the BBC claims. You can get a thousand calories from apples for £4.40 and a thousand calories from bananas for £1.30. This is a far cry from the £10.10 average reported in the study. Admittedly, it will cost you £12.50 to get a thousand calories from curly kale, and if you want to get them from celery it will be almost impossible, physically and financially, but that is one reason why those vegetables are considered healthy — they won’t make you fat.
That brings us to the second problem with the calculation. There is a tautological aspect to it. Energy dense food is “less healthy” by definition. The Nutrient Profiling Model, which is what is being used here, gives a food a lower score if it has a certain number of calories, and the more calories it has, the lower the score. It loses points for having too much sugar, salt and fat as well, but calories themselves are part of the grading system. If you then define a food as cheap or expensive based on how much it costs to buy a certain number of calories, low-calorie food is always going to look cheaper than high-calorie food. Kale will seem cheaper than carrots and a big bag of Kettle Chips will seem cheaper than a kilo of broccoli.
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