The food price dilemma

When it comes to food prices, we tend to display some pretty contradictory attitudes.

Indeed, we often seem to worry simultaneously that our food is both too cheap and too expensive. We complain low prices are encouraging excessive consumption, obesity and waste, while the true cost on producers, animals and the environment is hidden from the public.

But we are also outraged whenever food prices rise, worrying any increase in inflation will limit choice and access to vital nutrients, push up our cost of living, and drive a growing number of cash-strapped households to food banks.

Such contradictory attitudes can partly be explained by entirely justified concerns about prices for different foods – it is, after all, perfectly possible to worry that some foods are becoming more expensive while others become ever cheaper. More often than not, however, the message seems to be: food is too cheap unless you’re asking us to pay more for it, in which case it’s too expensive.

Why am I thinking about our attitudes to food prices? Because it’s the one-year anniversary of the horsemeat scandal this week, and because of the publication of a new report by Oxfam on food affordability today.

Both – in very different ways – highlight our problematic relationship with food prices and our difficulty in figuring out how much we should be paying for our food.

Oxfam’s report ranks 125 countries according to a) whether people have enough to eat; b) if they can afford to eat; c) if the food is good quality; and d) levels of obesity and diabetes. It’s an interesting piece of work that raises important questions about what it means to have good access to food, and it does a good job of highlighting food inequalities around the world.

But I was intrigued by its ranking of the UK (13th in the world) and the reactions to it. For context, the UK actually scored very well on many of the criteria used by Oxfam: it received top marks for its lack of malnutrition, undernourishment and access to safe water, but was dragged down in the rankings by what Oxfam described as relatively high and volatile food prices.

The British Retail Consortium has pointed out the Oxfam report measures affordability based on a range of indicators and is not a direct comparison of food prices – on a like-for-like basis, food prices in the UK are “among the lowest in Europe”, it adds.

The message seems to be: food is too cheap unless you’re asking us to pay more for it, in which case it’s too expensive

But the lasting impression in much of the coverage today is nevertheless that food prices in the UK are especially high, and that’s a bad thing. This is interesting, not least if you look at the questions about food prices thrown up by the horsemeat scandal.

Although the recent report by Professor Chris Elliott into the UK food system stressed expensive foods can be just as vulnerable to fraud as cheap ones, it also said consumers had become used to having access to a wide variety of foods at low costs and marginal profits to suppliers, and they – and their champions – needed to ask “searching questions about whether certain deals are too good to be true”.

And in our consumer poll with Ipsos Mori, published last week, nearly a third of consumers agreed with the statement “consumers have demanded cheap meat for too long” and said they believed pressure to keep meat prices low was a key reason as to why the horsemeat scandal had happened.

All of which is difficult to square with hand-wringing over high food prices. There’s no question it’s vitally important to ensure good-quality food is affordable to everyone – every person forced to rely on food banks is one person too many. But, as consumers, we also have to ask tough questions about whether our expectations on price are always reasonable and if we’re truly prepared to pay a good price for good food.

Twelve months on from Horsegate, it seems we are no closer to coming up with an answer.