Thread by @SteB777

@BootstrapCook, is to my knowledge the only person to ever highlight this phenomena.

"The Smart Price, Basics and Value range products offered as lower-cost alternatives are stealthily being extinguished from the shelves"
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https://twitter.com/BootstrapCook/status/1484953842957656070

I can not only confirm this phenomenon, but can confirm it happened before, in I think 2008-9. After the financial crash, there was a sudden rise in food prices. All the supermarkets immediately removed the "value" ranges from the shelves.
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This appeared to be to stop shoppers buying the "value" ranged products, instead of the standard range of products, which had just shot up in price. It was definitely not that they ran out. One day the shelves were full of these products, the next day they were gone.
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For many years after neoliberal policy started to be implemented, the less well off, those on low wages or benefits, have only been able to survive, by relying on these value ranges in supermarkets. They can be as much as 3 times cheaper.
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Therefore there has for a long time been a whole demographic in Britain, who could only afford to buy food by relying on these much cheaper range of foods and household products.
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This has meant that long before the current massive use of Food Banks, that the poorer members of society, have only been able to survive by buying these cheaper range of foods and household products.
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This was a perilous situation, because if these ranges were suddenly withdrawn by supermarkets, the poorest people in society, would suddenly be forced to pay 300% or sometimes more for staple items. Not the 10-20% ordinary shoppers faced.
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Another phenomena I noticed was that until 2009, it was possible to live incredibly cheaply on a vegetarian diet, because pulses (dried beans) were very cheap, and so were root vegetables. In 2009, they drastically rose in price, up to 200%.
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Unlike other food prices that settled back to nearer previous price levels, dried pulses stayed at very high levels, at least twice the former price. It is now bizarrely cheaper to buy tins of pre-cooked pulses, than dried pulses.
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From what I can make out, the only reason for this was that TV chefs suddenly made vegetarian food, trendy. I find it impossible to believe that equivalent weight of vegetarian foods, can cost more than the equivalent weight of the cheapest meat.
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For example you can buy 1 kilo of cooking bacon (off cuts) for £1.45, and the equivalent weight of dried pulses, will be typically over £2. Similarly vegetarian burgers etc, are more expensive than actual meat products.
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Animals are inefficient converters of food such as pulses and grains, fed to them, in terms of meat produced. Estimates for this vary between 2x-25x in meat:feed ratios.
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awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/

Therefore it is absolutely inexplicable that the same pulses, say soya, fed to animals, where it can take 10kg of soya, to produce 1kg meat, can be more expensive than the meat to shoppers. There is clearly some sort of price fixing, subsidies element going on here.
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I only make this point to bring in the climate crisis and sustainability, where it is well known that the biggest single contribution a person could make to lowering carbon emissions is to eat less/no meat.
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@BootstrapCook has made an extraordinary personal contribution to the wider understanding of the plight of the poorer section of the British public, and their ability to feed themselves, and the challenges they face. Few others were articulating this.
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