A few weeks ago I found myself being filmed in a New Zealand
supermarket searching for a healthy meal for four. The Kiwi equivalent
of
The One Show wanted me to help them demonstrate how much
more expensive it is to cook a nutritious meal than to eat out in a
well-known hamburger chain. In fact, I was able to buy all the
ingredients for a good quality, chicken stir-fry for half the price it
would have cost to buy four basic fast food meals. This seemed to come
as a shock to the show's presenters and, I would guess, to a fair number
of viewers since it is widely believed that burgers and chips are a
cheaper alternative to wholesome, home-cooked dinners.
Comparing the price of a fast food meal to the ingredients of a
homemade dish is, to be perfectly candid, a bit of a cheat. What about
the opportunity cost of preparing the meal? What about the financial
cost of heating the oven or taking the car to the supermarket? Even if
we had taken those costs into account, I suspect that the well-known
hamburger chain would still have lost the battle of the bargains, but it
must be conceded that the experiment was not entirely fair.
Comparing the price of 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' uncooked food in a
supermarket, on the other hand, is extremely fair. Again, it is widely
believed that the healthy stuff is more expensive and this perception is
strengthened by headlines such as
'Healthy diet costs three times that of junk food'.
Upon closer inspection, such claims are only tenable if you measure the
cost of food in a rather peculiar way and if you ignore the word
'diet'.
The study that inspired this headline was published in
PLoS One
this week. It didn't look at the cost of a healthy meal, let alone a
healthy diet. It looked at how much you would have to spend to get 1,000
calories out of various food products. By this method, lettuce—one of
which I bought yesterday for 49p—comes in at a whopping £16.45 whereas
energy dense foods like doughnuts and jam 'cost' less than a pound.
Voila! Healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food.
To see the problem here, we need to ask how foods come to be defined
as 'unhealthy' in the first place. The study in question relies on a
Food Standards Agency test which is used to decide what can and cannot
be advertised on children's television. One of the key criteria is
calorie content. The unhealthy foods have lots of energy in them and
this is measured by how many calories there are in 100 grammes of the
product. The more calories, the more likely it is to be placed on the
naughty list.
Calories are not unhealthy per se, of course, but the FSA's concern
is that eating energy-dense food is more likely to lead to obesity than
eating low-calorie food. That's all well and good, but it doesn't give
the 'healthy' food much chance of ever being cheap. Once you've decided
that the price of food is dictated by how much of a calorific bang you
get for your buck, low calorie food becomes expensive by definition. It
is a system that guarantees that a cauliflower will always be more
expensive than a pizza. A lettuce would have to be sold in the shops for
less than 2p for it to become cheaper than a sponge cake by this
measure.
Defining high-energy food as unhealthy and then defining cheapness as
being 'food with lots of energy in it' is tautologous. You might as
well declare heavy objects to be cheaper than light objects on the basis
that they cost less per ounce. It would be true, but not very
informative.
Low calorie foods are obviously not the best choice if you are in
need of energy. Complaining that people would have to buy lots of them
to get a thousand calories is to turn their virtue into a vice. It would
undoubtedly be expensive to meet your recommended daily calorie
allowance by eating lettuce, but it would also be horrible and probably
impossible. It is precisely
because lettuce is low in calories
that we buy the awful, tasteless stuff. We then put it on a plate with
other food to create a 'meal' and it is the cost of the
meal that matters.
Food prices have certainly risen in recent years—by 8.6 per cent in real terms since 2007, according to
DEFRA—but
they are still lower than at any time before 2002, and the price of
fruit and veg has actually fallen in the last year. To claim, as the
Independent
has, that 'Eating well is increasingly become the preserve of the rich'
borders on the histrionic. Your local supermarket will still sell you a
cauliflower for 89p, a bag of potatoes for £1.50 and a kilo of rice for
40p. If people are not eating as healthily as the Food Standards Agency
would like, it is not because we feel unable to get our day's calories
from the vegetable aisle. As the obesity figures show, getting enough
calories is the least of Britain's problems.
[Cross-posted from the IEA lifestyle blog]
