Food is too cheap ?

[Loveshelly]

Food has never been cheaper, meat is unbelievably cheap. Even with a conscious move towards less meat consumption it’s clear that huge consumption of cheap meat is going on.

AIBU to think that we all need to spend more on our produce, especially in the wake of brexit, we clearly cannot rely on cheap labour anymore. So we are going to have to pay more.

All I tend to see on MN is people desperate to get food bills down, then on another thread people fretting they can’t keep heating on all night.

Have we become totally skewed about what are the things we should be spending more and less on.

@BiLuminous

Theres absolutely no respect in that comment, Hawkins. Your assumptions that the poor are poor because they smoke fags is really showing your ignorance and lack of understanding. Educate yourself before you speak on things you dont know shit about.

I tried not to assume, and the way I tried to phrase the question was by asking have other areas been looked at where savings could be achieved, and I said fags, sky ect as examples, yes there maybe more factors involved but when writing research assignments, we was taught when looking at e.g. What may of caused x or contribute to cause x, was to consider all possibilities,

Food is, and has been for at least the past 15 years, extremely cheap in the UK. I'm almost astonished about all the threads saying "I can do my monthly shop for £xx" when it would cost me that for a week. There was even someone saying she done a 2 week shop for £22 the other day. That stuck in my head because something must be seriously wrong if food for (one person?) for two weeks, or even one week if I've remembered incorrectly, is only £22. How can that cover decent production and transport costs?

OP I caught a little bit of Prue Leith on the Food programme on radio 4 this week where she touched on this issue briefly. I’m sure it’s still available to listen to.

She was talking about the relative percentage of household income that’s been spent on food over time and how low it is now. You and her raise some interesting issues.
But I’ve no idea what the solution is. Especially while we have increasing numbers of people with no choice but to rely on food banks as a result of the other fixed (housing, utilities, council tax) costs of living being so high.

You do know that food prices are only rising because of Brexit, right?

They're not rising because we are suddenly deciding to give more money and recognition to the farmers and people who produce our food.

They're rising because the UK stupidly voted to screw up our trade deals.

We are not becoming more moral. All that's happened is we've kicked ourselves in the shin.

I do not agree we just accept inflation in other areas we simply have no choice but to pay it, for many people if cheap food was not available they could not eat! we are forced to pay massively high rent, utilities and so on and a very large portion of the population of this country are now literally just working to live and that's it its quite depressing really.

We pay (or did pay before the current inflation shit show) far less than our European counterparts for food, a far smaller proportion of our income. We pay far more for less secure housing.

We also have the highest fuel bills in Europe.

We as a country can't feed ourselves which is what I find worrying. We produce about 65% of our food requirements. The artificially low price of food means farms/food producers going out of business which means we rely on food imports more. Dangerous and costly.

I get what you are saying, OP. In other countries food prices are more reflective of the cost of production. Wages in the UK have been held down by massive movements of labour in the last 2 decades and the subsidy of low income workers, through the tax system.(allowing employers to pay less)

Cheap labour meant food prices could be low. However, the stagnation of wages across the board, while everything else has gone up massively, means that people can't absorb the real cost of food. When I was still living in London, my rent was 60% of my take home pay - it doesn't leave much room to absorb rises.

What's the answer? Wages have to increase and so does the cost of money to stop asset inflation. Will it though? I'm sceptical.

Did you grow up rurally? The reason many farms go bust is also because of property costs.

Farms where the farmers own the land typically do fine, and are often extremely wealthy. Those where the farmers are tenants have massive rent bills to pay and can struggle.

So the fact that housing/land costs are expensive for everyone can't be untied from whether food is too cheap or not.

However, food production was heavily subsidised by cheap labour and literal subsidises from the EU. Most farmers voted for brexit. You reap what you sow.

However, food production was heavily subsidised by cheap labour and literal subsidises from the EU.

The government have reformed subsidies to farmers to be fairer (EU was largely about how much land they owned, rather than about how much was utilised to actually produce stuff etc), but farmers will still receive one.

@EagleOrIgel

Food is, and has been for at least the past 15 years, extremely cheap in the UK. I'm almost astonished about all the threads saying "I can do my monthly shop for £xx" when it would cost me that for a week. There was even someone saying she done a 2 week shop for £22 the other day. That stuck in my head because something must be seriously wrong if food for (one person?) for two weeks, or even one week if I've remembered incorrectly, is only £22. How can that cover decent production and transport costs?

Re a £22 shop - depends if it was 'yellow label' or not when we were in food poverty I was going to the nearest supermarket at mark down time most days to buy as much as I could for 10p each. Loaves of bread, veg etc

Food, clothes, housing and electricity should be cheap or at least have cheap options in our society.
It's not up to poor people to pay extra to solve the issues that we have with animal welfare and sustainability.
Our system should be built, instead to sort it out

Go away Rishi

@CardiganAddict

Food, clothes, housing and electricity should be cheap or at least have cheap options in our society. It's not up to poor people to pay extra to solve the issues that we have with animal welfare and sustainability. Our system should be built, instead to sort it out

It's not just animal welfare - the people who produce food, clothes etc should be paid properly and they should be produced in an environmentally friendly way rather than in the disastrously wasteful fashion that lots of cheap clothing is produced.

How do you square the two? If you pay your workers properly you can't afford to sell your products for peanuts.

@Hawkins001, flipping heck, you've thrown out some banal stereotypes, haven't you? It's a shame when being taught to write assignments, you weren't educated upon the danger of a) sweeping generalisations and b) your poor quality of written English. 😎

I tried not to assume, and the way I tried to phrase the question was by asking have other areas been looked at where savings could be achieved, and I said fags, sky ect as examples, yes there maybe more factors involved but when writing research assignments, we was taught when looking at e.g. What may of caused x or contribute to cause x, was to consider all possibilities,

You used to write research assignments?

People who are buying really cheap meat are doing it because they have no choice. Most would prefer to buy a free range chicken. But this is what happens when supermarkets have bulk buying power (hence the price of milk) and we have successive governments who screw every other penny they can get out of us by allowing basics such as housing/utilities/travel to be so expensive.

@Hawkins001 - suggest you vary your reading matter from the Sun and Daily Mail. This is a fallacy trotted out by the right wing press to gullible, self-righteous people. If you had actually been in the situation of not being able to afford decent food I'm sure you would soon revise your attitude.

Whether people consider food to be cheap surely depends entirely on how much their income is, where their priorities lie, and a great many other variables.

Two years ago I had a lodger who repeatedly whined to me that the dole didn't give her enough to live on, and once or twice she even went to the food bank.

One day when she was out I put a lot of time and thought and effort into researching food prices (using online supermarkets) and then working out a week's menu for her that would cost her no more than £25.

When she arrived home I approached her to give her the printout of the menu and budget, and saw that she had a Chinese takeaway swinging in a bag from one hand and a bottle of wine in her other. She'd blown £10 on one meal plus £8 on the wine. When I remonstrated with her, she said £18 "wasn't all that much" for a meal she really enjoyed.

And the moral is we all see things differently! Our priorities are different, our judgments and values and upbringing, etc are all different.

There is no way I would waste £8 on a bottle of wine, because I don't like it. For a treat I'll buy myself a £3 pack of smoked salmon, and someone will comment that I'm being "extravagant".

Re a £22 shop - depends if it was 'yellow label' or not when we were in food poverty I was going to the nearest supermarket at mark down time most days to buy as much as I could for 10p each. Loaves of bread, veg etc
Ok, I understand that. But do you not see that a loaf of bread for 10p cannot be feasible if you think about what went into it's production? You wouldn't get anything for 10p where I live. The cheapest loaf of bread on mark down is about 50p.

I get your point, people as a whole consume way too much. Too much meat, too many clothes, too many things are replaced before their time.
I look at t shirts for £3 and wonder how on earth it gets made, transported and shelved for £3. Most people I know own more clothes and trinkets than they will ever use. Wages/living allowances need to increase for the poorest and things do need to cost more to cover their production and to stop so much waste. You hear of people chucking tonnes of unused food every week- that wouldn't have happened with the older generation.

You are correct in that post war feeding a family took up around 50 percent of income and housing around 20 percent. People rarely ate out and takeaway was a treat. The rest in health, travel and education. Leisure hardly registered. Now housing and travel and leisure dwarf food. Food has never taken up less of our income than now. But, as people say, any savings have been completely taken up with housing costs and transport. We spend more on commuting, eating out and electrical goods.
EU legislation creates huge barriers to entry in the food sector (deliberately) and production is centralized and intensive to lower production costs to lower costs to supermarkets. Whilst some might be able to avoid cheap protein from chickens etc, the vast majority have to buy cheap food because their other costs of living are so high.

Totally agree food is too cheap.

I'm a farmer producing something many people would buy in their supermarket shop once a week. We've just been informed our prices are being cut by the supermarkets because of rising costs. I spat my tea out when I read the letter. Our electricity prices have near on doubled. Nitrogen - I used to buy for £280 a Ton. Today it's more like £480. Staff pay rises are due next month and we like to try and keep up with inflation if we can. The houses we pay for our staff to live in have their council tax, electric and water going up. My husband is currently living in our caravan on the farm as there is Covid at the kids school and he can't afford to be ill. He's been there for 3.5 weeks now and this is the third stint he's done over the pandemic. Our staff are fantastic but there's so few of us and we cannot find more good people. We have shifts in school hours. The media says to people like us pay them more - I'd love to but we can't if the supermarkets won't put the prices up which they won't id Joe public won't pay 10p more for their milk/bread/eggs/chicken.

But we get a price cut.

There's also a huge dichotomy beteeen how the public shop and how they want to shop. Everyone says they want free range organic etc but the reality is for a lot of people is they can't afford that. The reality of that production system is cheap Labour from abroad. You can't have high wages and cheap food/transport/clothing. Or you can if people are prepared to pay for it.

Upthread someone mentioned the cost of land affecting farmers as well. This is so true. The government need to get rid of Rollover (farmers sell land for a shit load of money, have 3 years to buy more Ag land and you don't pay tax on it.) Also IHT needs reforming. As
Jeremy clarkson says "why buy a farm? Somewhere to put the money I've made where the kids won't pay tax on it"

I find it shocking the government is so blasé about food and energy supplies. Everyone needs water, food and warmth. The fact our country cannot sustainably produce two of those three is quite scary.

People can’t spend what they haven’t got.

Until enough homes are built to bring the cost of housing down to affordable levels, the demand for cheap everything else will continue.

Households don’t have magic money trees like governments. They can’t simply create more money to pay more for things simply because it is deemed desirable to pay more.

Let something be cheap FFS.
As others have said, everything else in this country is expensive

@Ylvamoon

I think we are currently having a huge price adjustment in goods and services. Bye bye to the cheap, low wage economy and hello to the real cost of of our goods and services! Also known as Brexit and conveniently blamed on The Pandemic. Granted, wages will be moving at a snail pace while everything else will race ahead at 200 mph. But things will even themselves out in the shape of a recession.

…real cost of our goods and services?

I think that is somewhat unrealistic.

What seems more likely is that we will import more food from areas of the world with lower levels of product and employment regulation because it will be cheap and people will demand it and happily chow down.

Services that can move online will move online and thus be delivered in the same way by people based in countries of lower regulation.

There is unfortunately a tension between people’s demand for protectionism and their willingness to pay the prices that our high cost of living and high regulation causes.

The demand for cheap stuff has always previously won out in that battle and people are more strapped for cash now so I see no reason why that demand would change now.