#RegenesisFact 14: In the UK, fruit and vegetables are out of the reach of millions – they’re just too expensive. Remember, from a previous thread: a healthy diet costs five times as much as one that’s merely adequate in terms of calories.
So what do we do about it? 🧵
So what do we do about it? 🧵
Clearly, we need a much better distribution of wealth, rent controls to ensure people have more money to spend on food, and other major shifts. But also, and immediately? The best proposal I’ve heard is also the simplest: subsidise the price of fruit and veg at the point of sale.
Where did this proposal come from? An eminent commission? A scientific journal? No, from the administrator of my local food bank, the wonderful Fran Gardner, who features in Regenesis. I think she’s onto something.
But surely this would be prohibitively expensive? No. Current retail sales of fruit and veg in the UK are £3.5 billion. If, say, the government carried half the cost, and this led to a doubling in the amount of produce consumed, state expenditure would be £3.5 billion a year.
This sounds a lot, until you remember that Test and Trace - which, the Public Accounts Committee says, has achieved none of its aims and failed to make “a measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic” - costs a total of £37 billion. But there’s a more direct comparison:
In the UK, farm subsidies cost us …. £3.5 billion a year. They mostly consist of payments for owning land. They’re hoovered* up by the biggest landowners, who are among the richest people in Britain, many of whom don’t live here or even have UK citizenship.
(*sorry, Dysoned)
(*sorry, Dysoned)
They do nothing to reduce the price of food, and they encourage massive and pointless environmental destruction. Retail subsidies for fruit and veg, by contrast, would reduce the price of good food, while supporting horticulturalists.
Not all the money we’d spend on subsidising fruit and veg would be lost to the Exchequer. The two main components of bad diet in the UK are an excess of bad food and a deficit of good food. One of the major causes of obesity is that people cannot afford good food.
So people in poverty must eat much cheaper, obesogenic food instead. Obesity is often associated with dietary deficiencies: a lack of vitamins, minerals and fibre.
Poor dietary health currently costs the NHS £6 billion a year, a bill that is likely to rise considerably in coming decades. Cheaper fruit and veg won’t solve the whole problem, but it would significantly reduce it. The subsidy is likely, at least in part, to pay for itself.
Should it not be means-tested? I don't think so. Few people in the UK eat enough fruit and veg. There's a limit to the amount the rich can consume. Means testing introduces stigma and complexity, while any savings it makes are likely to be quite small.
Please RT this thread if you think this is a good idea. Thanks.
Sources: i. UNFAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2020. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020. Transforming food systems for affordable healthy diets. Rome, FAO. doi.org/10.4060/ca9692…
v. Rocco Barazzoni and Gianluca Gortan Cappellari, 2020. Double burden of malnutrition in persons with obesity. Reviews in Endocrine and Metabolic Disorders, issue 21, pp. 307–313. doi.org/10.1007/s11154…
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