I volunteered to part in a medical research project for which I have had to write down in great detail (literally every recipe) everything I have eaten or drunk in the past seven days. It was an interesting exercise, and it really made me start to think about what I was eating. On a day to day basis, we forget we are what we eat, drink, and breathe – we are today what we ate yesterday.

While this was going on, I spotted Table 2 in a report by the economics team at work. What I found amazing was that in a time of rising affluence in the UK, we are choosing to spend less on our food – down from 21% to 16% of household expenditure. So, although we are spending more on leisure activities like (let’s be optimistic) going to the gym, we just don’t care enough about food to spend money on it.

This also tied in with a conversation I’d been having outside church, where I was encouraging someone to go along to the local farmers’ market. The lady was not impressed: “I’m not going there. If we’re buying direct from the farmer, then it should be cheaper than buying from the supermarket – but it isn’t.”

So, there’s a choice:

• buy a chicken from a farmer, where I can go to the farm and see the birds running around and know what they are eating
• buy a cheap chicken – often imported from abroad – where it has lived in dire conditions and been fed with rubbish and pumped full of antibiotics

However, I suspect food economics defies explanation even by the economics gurus at the day job:

• 19p – cost to farmer of producing 1 litre of milk
• 18p – price paid to farmer for 1 litre of milk
• 50p – price paid by consumer in supermarket for 1 litre of milk

and supermarkets are praised for bringing ‘eveyday low prices’ to UK consumers. Someone, somewhere, is taking the p*ss.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Greenery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.