The True Cost of Food

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The price of food is rising alongside fuel, energy and other costs, and experts are warning that households face the biggest squeeze on disposable incomes for at least 30 years. On average the lowest income families spend twice as much on food and housing bills as the richest families, so increasing food price inflation will disproportionately affect families already struggling to get by, according to the Resolution Foundation.

As millions more people are on the brink of being pushed into food poverty, the food industry faces a turning point. The publication of a government white paper responding to the recommendations of The National Food Strategy is expected soon. The strategy’s assessment was dramatic – that Britain needs to change what it eats and how it produces food, in order to reverse the damage it does to our health and the environment.

In today’s programme Sheila Dillon is joined by three guests to discuss the true cost of our food, and some of the issues we face in reforming the system. In these extreme conditions we now live in, how can we provide everyone with a decent diet that will underpin the UK as a healthy nation? With Tim Benton, Research Director of the Environment and Society Programme at Chatham House and Professor of Population Ecology at the University of Leeds; Kathleen Kerridge, anti-food poverty campaigner and Chair of the Lived Experience Panel at The Food Foundation; and Professor Corinna Hawkes, Director of the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London.

Presented by Sheila Dillon and produced by Sophie Anton for BBC Audio in Bristol.

Transcript

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0:44.6	Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program.
0:49.7	Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. We hope you enjoy it.
0:56.0	These are tough times. Petrol prices hitting record highs, energy bills rising to frightening levels under new price cap rules, and now
1:06.2	soaring food costs, rising at their fastest rate for eight years, though that's only a general
1:11.7	figure, as we'll hear later many budget foods are
1:14.7	now a hundred percent more expensive than they were a few weeks ago. So a once-in-a-generation
1:21.2	moment for food inflation it It'll affect us all, but the real pain will be felt as ever by those already struggling.
1:29.0	People focus on the lowest earners, but there's people that contact me they're working and they still
1:36.3	can't afford any sort of luxuries at all you know that it's a real struggle just
1:41.3	day-to-day to put food in the table and heat the house.
1:44.8	Welcome to the food program, that place for hungry mines.
1:48.4	As millions more people are on the brink of being pushed into poverty, the food industry faces a turning point.
	...

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