Turning virtue into vice

Food is the great leveller. We all eat it and we all buy it. A few of us may expect our spouses to do the grocery shopping and a tiny minority employ people to do such things for them, but nearly everybody has a rough idea how much food costs. This makes it all the more remarkable that the Food Foundation can make claims like this and that journalists at the BBC can find them credible:

A basket of healthy food costs more than double that of less healthy options, according to new analysis.

The Food Foundation found that 1,000 calories of healthy food such as fruit and veg costs £8.80, compared to £4.30 for the equivalent amount of less healthy food, such as ready meals and processed meats.

One of the two authors of this article rejoices under the job title of the BBC’s “Cost of Living correspondent”. I don’t know what the recruitment process is for such a role, but you’d think that having a vague idea of how much everyday consumables cost would be a minimum requirement. Did she not find anything fishy about these figures? A thousand calories is roughly what you’d get from a main meal. Does she really believe it is impossible to provide a healthy dinner for a family of four for less than £35? Does she believe it is impossible to give them an unhealthy dinner for less than £17.20, for that matter?

What is a basket of food anyway? If you fill a basket with fruit and veg it will generally cost less than a basket of “junk food”. You can get a kilogram of potatoes for 80p, a dozen bananas for £1.50, five apples for £1.70 and a kilogram of carrots for 70p. If that doesn’t satisfy your calorie requirements, you can add a kilogram of pasta for no more than £1.50 and a kilogram of rice for £1.25. Your basket will be heavy and overflowing and you still won’t have spent £8.80. Add in a loaf of wholemeal bread for £1 and you’ve got more than 8,000 healthy calories for less than the Food Foundation reckons it costs to get a thousand. 

Sure, you’d want to add some spreads and sauces and probably some meat or fish to put a meal together, but you’d need to do that regardless of whether you were aiming for a “healthy” or “unhealthy” diet. It is also true that there are ways of filling a basket with “unhealthy” food that would provide the same number of calories for the same price. Eight (very) cheap frozen pizzas would get you most of the way there and you could top it off with a couple of packs of chocolate bourbons (which have an incredibly low price-to-calorie ratio), but even that extreme example would not be cheaper than my healthy basket. 

The Food Foundation must be using a very odd methodology indeed but they don’t really tell us what it is. It seems to be based on this study published last year which found that the average price of 5,927 food items was £6.30 per 1,000 calories in early 2023. The cheapest food by this measure was “grains” (bread, rice, potatoes and pasta) which are deemed “more healthy” and cost £1.20 per 1,000 calories. The most expensive were fruit and vegetables which cost £10.10 per 1,000 calories. “Food & drink high in fat and/or sugar” were relatively cheap at £3.80 per 1,000 calories. Overall, “less healthy” food overall cost £3.30 per 1,000 calories whereas “more healthy” food cost £8.10 per 1,000. I can only imagine, since the Food Foundation doesn’t say, that they have upgraded these estimates in line with inflation. 

There are two problems with this, or at least with the Food Foundation’s interpretation of it. The first is the use of averages. Aside from the questionable use of the median rather than the mean average, the average price of various foods has little practical relevance to people who go shopping. It is certainly possible to spend stupid money on sun-dried tomatoes, exotic fruit, bags of salad and anything with the word “organic” on it. Supermarkets provide many options for the health-conscious consumer who has more money than sense, and they all help to lift the average. But the existence of a wide range of expensive healthy food does not mean that “low-income families are being priced out of being able to afford to eat healthily”, as the BBC claims. You can get a thousand calories from apples for £4.40 and a thousand calories from bananas for £1.30. This is a far cry from the £10.10 average reported in the study. Admittedly, it will cost you £12.50 to get a thousand calories from curly kale, and if you want to get them from celery it will be almost impossible, physically and financially, but that is one reason why those vegetables are considered healthy — they won’t make you fat.

That brings us to the second problem with the calculation. There is a tautological aspect to it. Energy dense food is “less healthy” by definition. The Nutrient Profiling Model, which is what is being used here, gives a food a lower score if it has a certain number of calories, and the more calories it has, the lower the score. It loses points for having too much sugar, salt and fat as well, but calories themselves are part of the grading system. If you then define a food as cheap or expensive based on how much it costs to buy a certain number of calories, low-calorie food is always going to look cheaper than high-calorie food. Kale will seem cheaper than carrots and a big bag of Kettle Chips will seem cheaper than a kilo of broccoli. 

One of the virtues of fruit and vegetables is that they tend to be low in calories. That is one of the reasons the Food Foundation wants you to eat more of them. But the way they calculate the cost of food turns that virtue into a vice. It is an absurd system made worse by their use of meaningless averages. Their claim that poor households would have to spend 70 pe cent of their income to afford a healthy diet, which I have debunked before, is equally ridiculous. A cost of living correspondent should know better.