The barriers to eating healthily and sustainably are many and varied but can be addressed with decisive leadership, according to a new report. By Nick Hughes.
The food system is in need of urgent repair. That’s the verdict of The Food Foundation whose latest ‘Broken plate’report assesses the state of the UK’s food environment across eight key metrics spanning health, sustainability and accessibility. The dispiriting conclusion is that it’s extremely difficult to eat healthily and sustainably when powerful forces are combining to push us in the other direction.
Healthy eating comes at a premium that many can’t afford. On average, healthier foods as defined by the government’s nutrient profiling model are more than twice as expensive per calorie as less healthy foods, with healthier foods increasing in price at twice the rate in the past two years. In practice this means many people simply can’t afford to eat a healthy diet. The most deprived fifth of UK households would need to spend an unrealistic 45% of their disposable income after housing costs to afford the government’s recommended Eatwell diet, according to the report.
Our diet is shaped by our environment. The report is packed full of examples of how consumer choice – the altar at which most big food companies worship – is largely an illusion. These include personal testimonies from the charity’s food ambassadors about the real-life barriers they face in eating healthily – poor local food provision (the only accessible shop doesn’t sell fresh produce); the unaffordable cost of gas for cooking vegetables from scratch; inadequate transport links to shops selling healthy food. The list goes on.
The out of home sector is complicit in shaping unhealthy environments. For all that many restaurants and caterers are trying to up their game on health and sustainability, the research finds that high streets and town centres continue to be saturated by typically unhealthy fast-food outlets. A quarter of places to buy food in England were fast food outlets in June 2024, a figure that has remained largely unchanged since The Food Foundation first began monitoring the data in 2018. The proportion of fast-food outlets is much higher in the most deprived quintile of areas (31%) compared with the least deprived (22%) – another blocker to low-income families buying healthier options.
Not that supermarkets are absolved from blame. Promotional activity continues to be heavily skewed towards unhealthy foods with over a third (36%) of food and non-alcoholic drink advertising spent on confectionery, snacks, desserts and soft drinks, compared to just 2% on fruit and vegetables.
There are no easy answers. But there are, says the charity, ways to make it easier for people to eat healthier, more sustainable diets. Among the report’s recommendations are for better incentives for reformulation to help shift the balance towards more healthy food; for local authorities to use planning powers to prevent further proliferation of unhealthy fast-food outlets; and for greater transparency around the types of food that businesses sell with mandatory targets for boosting sales of healthy and sustainable foods.
Action needs to come from the very top – both from governments and businesses. The Food Foundation says “visionary leadership with ambition to not merely tweak around the edges with token gestures, but to create transformative change can bring us back from the brink”. The Labour government, by contrast, continues to keep its cards close to its chest. Its response last week to the House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee’s report ‘Recipe for health: a plan to fix our broken food system’ rarely went beyond a succession of pledges to “continue to review the evidence” for interventions recommended by peers. During a webinar to discuss the government’s response, the committee’s chair, Baroness Walmsley, ostentatiously tore up the government document in disgust.
All eyes now turn to the forthcoming food strategy. Indeed, it would be unusual for the government to announce a raft of policy changes in response to someone else’s report. Ministers like to stage-manage such occasions and prepare the ground with key stakeholders. Is Labour keeping its powder dry ahead of the forthcoming publication of an ambitious national food strategy? Or is this another example of how the ‘growth at all costs’ agenda is acting as a blocker to social and environmental policies? We’ll soon find out.
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