Peas Please is a supply chain initiative aimed at driving up consumption of veg, and as such we have had a lot of discussion about price – is it a barrier to consumption? Are low prices sustainable or desirable?
The free-market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) recently published a report that claimed that healthy diets are just as cheap as unhealthy diets, and used it to refute work done by Cambridge University, which showed that unhealthy diets are cheaper. Unfortunately, the quality of their work left a lot to be desired and they give no explanation of which supermarkets they chose, or how they chose the foods they examined. Unless you use decent methods for work of this kind, you can find any list of products and prices to support your argument. In contrast, Cambridge University uses the CPI basket of foods and has subjected their work to academic peer review.
Methods aside, does price matter? It depends. There are now sizeable groups of working families in Britain who survive on extremely low incomes. For these people, price really does matter, but so do other things. Greenwich Borough in London has just done a survey of food poverty. It is a sobering read, full of witness statements like this: “In our last session... there was a lady nearly crying, telling me she has £10 to last for the rest of the week and she didn’t know whether to buy some food for her children or to put some electricity on the meter to get hot water and a bit of heating.”
But even if you can afford to eat a healthy diet and many people on very low incomes manage to do this, we don’t only eat to meet our nutrient requirements. Quality and taste matter, too. Eating brings us pleasure and it should be the stuff of memories, as Clara Widdison, manager of Community Shop explains so well in the first blog in our Peas Please series.
Unfortunately, the IEA uses its research to argue against fiscal measures to create price incentives for healthy eating (despite the mounting evidence for their effectiveness). We are keen for Peas Please to open a discussion about the potential role of consumer subsidies for horticulture to drive up demand for British produce.
This could be achieved by, for example, expanding and improving the existing Healthy Start programme that provides fruit and veg vouchers for pregnant women and mothers of young children on a low income, or expanding the school fruit scheme to include nurseries. We could also learn from the USA’s experience of the ‘double value coupon programme’, which leverages public and private sector funds to double the value of food stamps spent on fruit and veg.
These approaches could help us to link up health, food and farming policy in Britain, and help fruit and veg producers, the NHS and low-income households all at once.
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