The Road to Wigan Pier: Orwell on food and poverty

George Orwell is often quoted by people who say that poor people can't afford to eat healthy food.

George Orwell The Road to Wigan Pier Chapter 6

"Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you."

1. Orwell was talking about unemployed miners' families before the war, so what he says is hardly applicaple to today's unemployed. Benefits were low and families were big.
2. He seems to be confusing healthy food with health food. Where I live now, Liverpool, there is a healthy cheap food called scouse. Scouse has some meat in it, quite a bit of potato, and loads of different vegetables. It's a healthy cheap food, but it's not 'health food'. It's not dull either. Other regions have similar foods, in Scotland they have Scotch Broth where barley is the cheap starch instead of potato.
3. I can remember when brown bread was regarded as a health food and quite expensive. Today in supermarkets it's the same price as white. Brown (or wholegrain) bread has sustained populations in Europe and the Middle East for thousands of years; it's only in the past 100 years or so that white bread became cheap.
4. There are about 800 million people in the world who are starving. Do you think that if you offered any one of them a loaf of brown bread they would say 'No thanks, I would rather starve'? We know what people are prepared to eat when they are starving because of accounts of life in concentration camps. So it's nonsense to say 'The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots'.
5. Who gave Orwell the right to put words into the mouths of unemployed miners and their families in the 1930s? I don't believe that they would say that they would prefer to starve than eat brown bread.

new study shows healthy foods more expensive?

There is a study published this week that claims to show that more healthy foods were consistently more expensive than less healthy foods, and have risen more sharply in price over time. There have been a number of studies that claim the same thing and the problem with them is that they have ignored foods such as pasta and rice which are both cheap and healthy.

This new study doesn't do that. It includes a group of foods 'Bread, rice, potatoes, pasta'. The graph below, from the survey, shows that this group is not only the cheapest (in terms of the cost of calories) but hasn't been rising.

So how do they come to the conclusion that healthy foods are more expensive? It all depends where you get the bulk of your calories from. One healthy option is to get most of your calories from pasta, long-grain rice, porridge and other low-GI starchy foods. These are cheap. Pasta and long-grain rice are 40p per kilo form Aldi or Lidl which makes them even cheaper in terms of cost of calories than sugar.

Yellow split peas are the cheapest source of protein. They are also a cheap source of calories. Other pulses are too. People don't need as much protein as they think, and they don't realise that they get a lot of their protein requirements from relatively low-protein sources such as pasta.

Plants such as pulses are always the cheapest source of protein. However, it is good to have some meat, fish and eggs. Also some milk, cheese or other dairy foods. Variety is good because you will be getting more of a range of micronutrients. You don't need much of these though, and if you're poor you can cut down on them.

There's something a bit daft about measuring the cost of high-protein foods in terms of cost of calories, which is what this study does. You don't eat meat, cheese, fish or eggs for the calories. It's even dafter measuring the cost of fruit and vegetables in terms of cost of calories. We should eat very little of things like meat and lots of vegetables.

Vegetables bulk out food, add flavour, and provide micronutrients (vitamins, minerals and things like lutein). The fact that most of them don't come out well in the £s per 1,000 calorie stakes is irrelevant. A 1 kilo bag of mixed frozen vegetables cost about 75p. Poor people can afford them.

I have a problem with their choice of categories. They have five categories of foods. With the 'Bread, rice, pasta, potatoes' category, they're probably averaging prices. Rice and pasta can be incredibly cheap, but there are also expensive brands. Bread, in the form of a sliced loaf, isn't particularly cheap. Flour, however, can be incredibly cheap. Potatoes are cheap if you buy them by the sack from Morrisons but they can be expensive too. So the really cheap calories are even cheaper than what is shown in their graph.

Yellow split peas, other pulses, and animal protein all go into the same category. Yet there is an enormous difference in price, both in terms of cost of calories (which is their criterion) or in terms of cost of protein. There are also big differences between vegetables such as carrots and cabbage, and vegetables such as frozen peas (potatoes although a vegetable are in a different category).

If you eat the average nutritionist's conception of a healthy diet it would include quite a bit of some expensive food items. It doesn't have to though. Vegetarians would argue that meat isn't necessary and vegans would argue that eggs and cheese aren't necessary. So you can eat cheaply and healthily. They've got their facts right but they've interpreted them wrongly.

cheaper than anywhere else but tasting better?

We're all familiar with the idea that cheap food probably isn't going to taste too good and that we have to pay a premium for the yummiest, but just occasionally you can get food that tastes better AND is cheaper. It doesn't happen often, but for example Waitrose now have shortbread that tastes like shortbread should do but is only £1. Proper shortbread tastes divine but you can't find it often. When I go to Liverpool I often go to the cafe of the Museum of Liverpool where they have good shortbread but it's a lot more than £1.

Also when I go to Liverpool I go to Eat 4 Less at 3 Richmond Street. They do baguettes there which are incredibly cheap but taste better than anyone else's. I think they're 99p or £1 but they are generous with the numerous fillings which taste great. Their baguettes seem to be freshly baked too. I get the egg mayonnaise with cress baguette and also the brie baguette. I ask them to do the brie one without cranberry and they make that for me. The brie always seems nicely ripened too.

ASDA do 4 egg custard tarts for £1. Some other supermarkets do too, but ASDAs custard tarts taste wonderful. The pastry is lovely and they put lots of nutmeg on top.

My favourite coffee is filter coffee and so I just love Pret A Manger filter coffee for 99p. Why would I spend more than twice as much on a latte or cappuccino that I wouldn't enjoy so much? I do get a latte from Waitrose when I go in for my shortbread because it's FREE. If you've got a Waitrose card it's free.

The other thing I love is Lancashire Farm yogurt. You can get this from a number of supermarkets. It's about £1.40 for a big 1kg tub. They call it Natural Probiotic which is what we used to call live yogurt. I think it tastes better than other yogurts. They also do a low-fat version, I've tried it but I can't say I like it as much.

If you've got any examples of foods that taste better than everywhere else and yet are cheaper than anywhere else please tell us about it and comment.

the cost of calories

I came across this page on the Food Commission site. They claim to be 'Britain's leading, independent watchdog on food issues'. They have a chart similar to my own, except that they miss out the most important foods, the starchy staples. This gives a completely misleading impression, making it seem that it is the unhealthy foods that are the cheapest.

They have fallen into the trap of the false dichotomy, talking as if the only two alternatives are fatty sugary foods on the one hand and cabbages and carrots on the other. As they say on this page:-

Keeping hunger pangs at bay without stretching your budget is simple if you like fatty, sugary food. By comparison, cabbages and carrots are a very poor bargain - you can spend a small fortune on salad and fruit and still feel hungry.

This is what the table should look like, after the cheapest foods have been inserted and with the information updated from 2007 prices to 2014 prices, all from Lidl. They are using a different measure, the cost of 100 calories in pence, which is different from the measure I used of calories per penny. Anything cheaper than 14.5p per 100 calories (7 calories per penny) is deemed as affordable to low income families.

Foodstuffs	Cost of 100 calories in pence
Long-grain rice	1.2
Spaghetti	1.3
Vegetable oil	1.3
Digestive biscuits	1.6
Custard cream biscuits	1.8
Sugar	2.0
Porridge	2.1
Extra virgin olive oil	3.2
Couscous	3.6

How I worked out the cost of 100 calories
Long-grain rice: 40p per kilo: 3,510 kcals per kilo: 40/35.1=1.139
Spaghetti: 46p per kilo: 3,500 kcals per kilo: 46/35=1.314
Vegetable oil: £1.09 per litre: 8,280 kcals per litre: 109/82.8=1.316
Digestive biscuits (Tower Gate): 31p per 400g pack: 4,990 kcals per kilo: 77.5/49.9=1.553
Custard cream biscuits: 35p per 400g pack: 4,950 kcals per kilo: 87.5/49.5=1.767
Sugar: 79p per kilo: 4,000 kcals per kilo: 79/40=1.975
Porridge: 39p per 500g: 3,750 kcals per kilo: 78/37.5=2.08
Extra virgin olive oil (Primadonna): £1.99 per 750ml: 8,210 kcals per litre: 199/61.575=3.23
Couscous: £1.35 per kilo: 3,750 kcals per kilo: 135/37.5=3.6

The next one in the original Food Commission table is Frozen sausages which costs 4.3p per 100 calories. I haven't bothered with all of the other ones lower down in the table because it would take too long to collect the data and do the calculations. The point is that there are plenty of healthy calories available at a cheap price. Rice and spaghetti are cheaper than biscuits and even sugar, with porridge and couscous not far behind.

Other candidates for cheap calories are yellow split peas, polenta and chapatti flour. Lidl don't sell these and most people don't know what to do with them or they take some time to prepare. Chapatti flour at £4 for 10 kilos (or sometimes less) is as cheap as the rice, which is the cheapest in the table. Yellow split peas are probably the cheapest source of protein, cheaper than any meat or cheese, and also do well as a source of cheap calories.

I might add that a 1kg bag of frozen mixed vegetables cost 75p, which doesn't come out well in the pennies per 100 calories stakes but you don't buy vegetables for the calories and they are still affordable. Salad and fruit don't give many calories, they add micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, lutein etc) and flavour, and bulk out food.

Having said that, vegetables such as potatoes, frozen peas and frozen sweetcorn can compare favourably to many common processed foods even in terms of calories per penny or price per 100 calories. Only the sweetcorn is outside the target 14.5p per 100 calories and only just.
Potatoes: £4.29 per 7.5 kilo: 820 kcals per kilo: 57.2/8.2=7
Frozen Garden Peas or Petit Pois: 99p per kilo: 750 kcals per kilo: 99/7.5=13.2
Frozen Supersweet Corn: £1.40 per kilo: 910 kcals per kilo: 140/9.1=15.4

Tesco potatoes, peas and sweetcorn are considerably cheaper than Lidl. I couldn't find any frozen sausages in Lidl but I found some in Tesco. Tesco Everyday Value 20 frozen pork sausages work out at 6.8p per 100 calories. Tesco Everyday Value White Potatoes 2.5Kg work out at 5.6p per 100 calories. So it's cheaper to get calories from potatoes (healthy) than sausages (unhealthy). Tesco Everyday Value Garden Peas work out at 12.4p per 100 calories. Tesco Everyday Value Sweetcorn 907G works out at 9.5p per 100 calories.

When it comes to protein, the sausages give 0.63g of protein per penny. Tesco Everyday Value Chicken Breast Fillets are even worse value for money providing 0.48g of protein per penny. Tesco Yellow Split Peas however provide 2.2g of protein per penny. Even allowing for the fact that plant protein is not as good quality as animal protein, it's clear that no matter how cheap and rubbishy you buy your meat it is never going to be cheap protein. Pulses are cheap protein. Tesco frozen peas provide 0.6g of protein per penny, almost as much as the sausages.

It doesn't matter how rich you are, if you were stupid enough to try and get all your daily calories from cabbages and carrots then you would always go hungry. You should be getting most of your calories (whether you're rich or poor) from low GI starches such as rice and pasta. And they're the cheapest. But the Food Commission aren't going to tell you that. They should be doing that instead of misleading poor people about what they can afford to eat and their health.

Below is a table showing most of the foods I have mentioned above. It shows that rice and pasta are the cheapest, and also that some vegetables do well as reasonably cheap sources of calories. Only the Lidl sweetcorn and the Tesco chicken are outside the range of what is deemed affordable. The false dichotomy in use by the Food Commission and others is wrong, not only because they leave out starchy staples such as rice and pasta, but also because not all vegetables are low in calories.

Supermarket	Foodstuffs	Cost of 100 calories in pence
Lidl	Long-grain rice	1.2
Lidl	Spaghetti	1.3
Lidl	Vegetable oil	1.3
Lidl	Digestive biscuits	1.6
Lidl	Custard cream biscuits	1.8
Lidl	Sugar	2.0
Lidl	Porridge	2.1
Tesco	Natco Fine corn meal (polenta)	3.2
Lidl	Extra virgin olive oil	3.2
Tesco	Yellow split peas	3.5
Lidl	Couscous	3.6
Tesco	Everyday Value White potatoes	5.7
Tesco	Everyday Value 20 Pork sausages (frozen)	6.8
Lidl	Potatoes	7.0
Tesco	Everyday Value Sweetcorn (frozen)	9.5
Tesco	Everyday Value Garden peas (frozen)	12.4
Lidl	Garden peas or petit pois (frozen)	13.2
Lidl	Supersweet corn (frozen)	15.4
Tesco	Everyday Value Chicken breast fillets (frozen)	39.9

Instead of talking about two types of food, as happens with this false dichotomy, we should be talking about five different types of food. We should compare their relative merits in terms of cost of calories and protein, and their healthiness. These are the five types of food we need to consider.

1. fatty and/or sugary food, often high in salt too
2. low starch vegetables such as cabbages and carrot, salad and fruit
3. low-GI grains and grain products such as rice, pasta, porridge and polenta
4. dried pulses such as yellow/green split peas, lentils and beans
5. higher starch vegetables such as potatoes, frozen peas and frozen sweetcorn
6. oil

Vegetable oil isn't particularly unhealthy. Any oil can contribute to obesity if you have too much of it. Vegetable oil is low in saturated fat but high in omega-6. This can cause health problems. Rapeseed oil is an exception to this. Refined rapeseed oil is quite cheap, and the unrefined rapeseed oil seems to be coming down in price. Olive oil is low in saturated fat and omega-6. If you buy Lidl Primadonna extra virgin olive oil it is surprisingly cheap. And it has won a taste test, along with Aldi EVOO brand of extra virgin olive oil. Extra virgin olive oil should not be used for frying food.

Bread should be a cheap healthy source of calories. Supermarket sliced white bread doesn't come out well when you calculate the cost of calories. Chapatti flour is possibly the cheapest food of all in terms of cost of calories. I have read that Indian people often prefer to grind their flour at home when they need it because it's fresher and tastes better. It should be healthier too, the oil in the germ is retained but doesn't become rancid, and the particle size is larger which means it has a lower GI. Most people don't know how to make chapattis and wouldn't want the bother, the same applies to loaves.

It looks as if there are eight cheap and healthy foods. Rice, pasta, porridge, polenta, olive oil, yellow split peas, couscous and potatoes. The only unhealthy foods that can match them in price are vegetable oil, biscuits and sugar. All the other foods in the Food Commission table, even cheap frozen pork sausages, can't match them. Even then the rice and pasta beat them.

Arabella Weir talking rubbish about food and poverty

"If you're hungry, and your last 30p will buy you a whole packet of biscuits or one single apple, what would you choose? I believe it is IMPOSSIBLE to eat well if you're poor."

This is what the comedian Arabella Weir stated on the Food & Drink programme on BBC 2 earlier this week. You can see it here. I think she is completely wrong on this issue. Why does she think that biscuits or apples are the only two alternatives? You can buy 3/4 of a kilo of rice for 30p or half a kilo of pasta.

I was in ASDA on Monday and because I knew she was going to say this I looked at the price of biscuits. I couldn't find any packets of biscuits for 30p. I'm sure if someone had the time to shop around they could find biscuits for 30p but the nearest to that in ASDA - which is not one of the more expensive supermarkets - is ASDA smart price Rich Tea biscuits for 31p. The packet weighs 400g and the information on the back says that there are 455 calories in every 100g.

This means that there are 1,820 calories in a pack. Divide that by 31 and you find that the biscuits provide just under 59 calories per penny. Rice provides nearly 88 calories per penny and pasta provides just over 59 calories per penny. There are some supermarkets that sell pasta for less that 30p per half kilo. So rice and pasta are always a better bet because they are cheaper and because they are low GI sources of calories.

One of the people she was debating with said you can buy pulses, rice and lentils cheaply. Lentils are one type of pulse. The quality of this debate is extremely poor - nobody seemed to know what they are talking about. Arabella's smug reply to that is "Have you ever fed children lentils?". What does she think that millions of parents in India feed themselves and their children on? She chose not to mention rice. Pasta is a favourite food for most children, and it doesn't cost much to make pasta palatable.

Her argument doesn't make sense. If the argument is about affordability, then it doesn't make sense to contradict someone who says that lentils (and other pulses and rice) are affordable by saying that children won't eat them. Then it becomes an argument about British children refusing to eat healthy food and how parents respond to that. In most parts of the world children eat what they are given, they're not offered alternatives. If your children refuse to eat healthy food then it doesn't matter how much money you have. If you are poor and you can offer your children healthy food such as rice, pasta and pulses but your children don't like them then the problem is not affordability.

Many people on benefits - pensioners for example - don't have dependent children. People with children receive more in benefits than people who are childless; it's people on Job Seekers Allowance and without children who are the poorest. People who go to food banks are usually people who have had delays in receiving their benefits.

So I don't see why people can't eat lentils. Lentils aren't that cheap though, it's yellow split peas that are the cheap pulses. Both lentils and yellow split peas can be used for soup, for the Indian dish dal, and also for felafels although more often chickpeas are used for that.

The family size frozen lasagna she mentions provides under 10 calories per penny. Iceland sell a 1.6 kg family size frozen lasagna. There's a bit of confusion on their site about how many calories there are in the pack because they state that there are 172 calories (kcals) per 100g but 635 calories per 1/4 pack. 172 x 16 is 2752 but 635 x 4 is 2540. So somewhere Iceland have put incorrect information of their site.

Let's assume the higher figure of 2752. The pack cost £3. 2752/300 gives us the figure of just over 9 calories per penny. So to advise poor people to eat lasagna is extremely poor advice based on an ignorance of the facts. I'm aware that lasagna provides protein as well as calories but most poor people in Britain eat far more protein than they need.

She's wrong in assuming that lasagna is an unhealthy food. The Iceland lasagna isn't particularly unhealthy. It has more pasta in it than the meat and cheese combined, so it doesn't contain that much saturated fat. It does contain some sugar, and it would have been better if it didn't, but it isn't the 50/50 combination of fat and sugar that is the real problem with much processed food.

The recent BBC 2 programme Sugar v Fat was mostly boring but towards the end they showed the results of experiments with rats. Professor Paul Kenny fed rats either fat but no sugar or sugar but no fat. Both these groups restricted the number of calories they ate and didn't put on weight. When he fed rats a 50/50 combination of fat and sugar, however, they overate and became obese. There are two ways to interpret this. Either a 50/50 combination of fat and sugar is particularly alluring. Or when foods are combined we often can't taste all of the different ingredients.

So I don't agree that people become obese because our ancestors on the savanna were always short of food and needed to eat everything they could. People don't actually crave a fatty food or a sugary food that much. They quickly become repulsive, tasting too fatty or too sweet. We do have an 'off' switch for them. The fat/sugar combination is not found in nature and we don't have an 'off' switch for it. This is the biggest problem with processed foods.

Arabella finishes off her piece by saying "So come on, you pretentious foodies, stop lecturing people with less cash than you about what they should be eating!" I'm not a foodie and I live on benefits. Telling poor people - incorrectly - that their best options are biscuits and frozen lasagna is doing exactly what she accuses others of doing, lecturing people with less cash than her about what they should be eating.

a children's favourite

instant noodles

I listened to the recent episode of Thinking Allowed on Radio 4. Laurie Taylor was talking to Deborah Gewertz about her book on instant noodles.

She had this to say.

"... they will allow poor people to be sustained in contexts of extreme poverty. I would very much like a world in which extreme poverty did not exist but it does and it looks like it's going to get worse as the population of the world increases to 9 to 10 billion by 2050 and the question that we contemplate in our book is how are these people going to be fed. Of course we would love it if people had healthy food to eat but since it's not likely that poverty will decrease instant noodles will remain a proletarian hunger killer."

The problem with this is that if you do the calculation and work out how many calories per penny instant noodles provide then it isn't much compared to other foods.

Tesco Everyday Value chicken flavour instant noodles cost 15p for a 65g pack that has 260 calories.
Lidl long-grain white rice costs 40p for 1kg and has 3,510 calories.
Lidl organic whole-grain farfalle costs 99p for 500g and has 1,685 calories.

instant noodles: about 17 kcals/p
rice: about 88 kcals/p
organic whole-grain pasta: about 17 kcals/p

This means that rice provides more than 5 times the number of calories per penny as instant noodles, whereas the very much healthier organic whole-grain pasta is slightly cheaper. So it is wrong for Deborah Gewertz to state that poor people can't afford to eat healthier food than instant noodles. It is not only wrong but it is misleading people into making poor choices about how to feed their families and keep them healthy.

It is possible that instant noodles may be cheaper in some parts of the world than in Britain, but I wouldn't expect the relative price of instant noodles and rice to be much different. I think since writing this the cost of Tesco noodles is now 20p which makes them even less value for money. Looking at the information on the back of packets of noodles, it does seem that there is some confusion over how many calories they have. I'm going on the information provided on the Tesco site. It may turn out that instant noodles may be a bit cheaper than organic whole-grain pasta, but there is no doubt they are more expensive than rice.

instant noodles

Deborah Gewertz is one of many people who believe that unhealthy food is cheapest, and that's why poor people eat it. They all seem to disagree on what it is that poor people are condemned to eat. She believes that it is instant noodles. Danish food writer Katrine Klinken believes that is it cheese and butter. Zoe Williams and some of her fellow Guardian journalists believe it is burgers and crisps. They have all got it wrong, and it is easy to show that this is true. Just by looking at the facts. If anyone deserves to be likened to Marie Antoinette it is these three women, not people like me.

They seem to believe that poverty in Britain today is the same as poverty in Britain decades ago or poverty in countries like India today. It isn't. Nobody today is in the same situation as mining families in the 1920s. The problem with all these people is that they have to believe in one extreme or the other. There are some people who believe that poor people are totally responsible for the situation they find themselves in. They tend to be on the right of the Conservative Party. Then there are others who believe in the exact opposite, that poor people have absolutely no control over what happens to them whatsoever. They tend to be on the left of the Labour Party. They think poor people are victims, and that to suggest there are ways to eat more healthily and spend less money is blaming the victim.

The truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. We can all learn more about nutrition. We can all learn what we need to eat and what we can cut back on.

Polly Toynbee playing at being poor

I have been reading Hard Work by Polly Toynbee. Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee tried living on a council estate and tried different low-paid jobs. I was interested in Chapter 4 Spending where she recounts trying to buy food cheaply. She went to Lidl, seemingly for the first time in her life, and bought what she thought was cheap food.

Looking at the list of foods she bought, my first thought is that she's including rice, pasta and yellow split peas. That's good, rice and pasta are really the cheapest foods that you can buy, and yellow split peas are a cheap source of protein. There was something a bit strange about this list though. She wrote that 1 kg of rice cost 55p, even though it was reduced in price. However, in Lidl and a number of supermarkets cheap rice has been 40p a kilo for a number of years.

The other strange thing is that she wrote that Lidl doesn't sell lentils. She wrote that she went to Sainsbury's to buy lentils. Lidl do sell lentils, and have done so for years. I remember that they were 88p per half kilo for years, and now they are 90 something p. The book was published in 2003 but I find it difficult to believe that cheap rice was 55p per kilo and they didn't have any lentils.

She was quite pleased with her efforts. She wrote:-

I add it up and it totals £8.05! How clever! I feel like one of those smug people who sometimes send me letters responding to pieces I have written about poverty, boasting about how they brought up family of six on lentils and home-made bread - and jolly good it was for them too.

She doesn't comprehend that when someone sends her letters like this it's not because they are boasting, it's because they are angry. If a journalist writes something - that poor people can't possibly afford to eat healthy food - and a poor people knows that this is false, then they want to show that the journalist is wrong. It makes them angry that journalists are not helping poor people by telling them they are condemned to eating unhealthy food for the rest of their lives when they know damned well that this is not so. They know it's not so because they have been eating healthy food for years on little money.

Perhaps Polly Toynbee would think that Jack Monroe is smug too. Jack Monroe is a single mother who writes a blog where she shows people how to cook for little money. There's a section on her blog detailing budget recipes. I think that Jack Monroe is more of a help to poor people than Polly Toynbee will ever be.

Polly Toynbee ends chapter 4 by saying that if you're poor you might as well go into debt because they've got nothing to lose. I suppose if I was to suggest to some of my neighbours in my council block of flats that they would be better off going to a credit union than a loan shark, she would consider that smug too.

In my estimation, there's nothing more smug than a middle class Guardian journalist who goes to Lidl for the first time in her life as material for her book but doesn't stick around for long enough to find out where the cheap rice and the lentils are.

nitrogern fertilizer

In this month's National Geographic magazine is an article titled Fertilizer Curse Could agriculture destroy our planet?. It is about artificial nitrogen fertilizer - it's benefits to humanity but also the problems that it causes. It is made in giant factories from the nitrogen in the air and hydrogen from natural gas. It helps crops to grow abundantly but it is also 'suffocating wildlife in lakes and estuaries, contaminating groundwater, and even warming the globe's climate'.

In the article it is stated 'Nearly half the people on the planet wouldn't be alive if not for the abundant food made possible by nitrogen fertilizer'. I don't believe this. If industrial nitrogen fertilizer had never been available then agriculture would be different in two ways. Firstly, we would be growing more pulse and less grain. Pulses do not need so much nitrogen because they can get it from bacteria in their roots. We would be eating more peas and lentils and less bread and pasta. Secondly, we would not be feeding so much grain and soya to farm animals. We would be eating that grain and soya ourselves. Eating more pulses, we wouldn't need the protein from farm animals. Also we probably wouldn't be eating more protein than we need.

I'm not saying that we should try to do without nitrogen fertilizer. As this article suggests, we should continue to use it, but more intelligently and sparingly. In intensive rice-growing areas of the world, they don't feed much grain or soya to farm animals. So they need fertilizer more than wheat/barley/maize growing areas of the world. Half of the world's wheat, and even more of the barley and maize, are fed to farm animals. African soils often have little nitrogen, so they benefit a lot from it too. However, many Africans can't afford nitrogen fertilizer.

Overestimating the importance of industrially-produced nitrogen fertilizer by writing that half the population of the planet would not be alive without it is not helping the debate. The (human) population of the planet is 7 billion, the pig population of the planet is 1 billion. I doubt that these 1 billion pigs (and however many billion chickens and cattle) would be alive today without nitrogen fertilizer. That would be a good thing, though.

global food waste and factory farming

I read a letter in today's Daily Mail that expresses the most important points that I have been trying to make in this blog. Food waste is an issue prominent in the news recently, and Philip Lymbery of Compassion in World Farming wrote that feeding so much grain and soya to farm animals is another way that we waste food. I would have liked to place a link to this letter (Feed the world) in this post but couldn't find one, so I shall link to a post in his blog that has the same message.

I shall give a few of the facts stated in the letter

• a third of the world's cereal harvest is fed to farm animals
• 90% of the world's soya beans are destined for factory-farmed animals
• for every 6kg of plant protein such as cereals fed to livestock, we get back, on average, only 1kg of meat or other livestock products
• for every 100 food calories of edible crops fed to livestock, we get back just 30 calories in meat and milk
• factory farms are food factories in reverse, they waste food rather than make it

There were two letters in New Scientist recently that interested me. The first was a response to a review of a book 'One Billion Hungry: Can we feed the world?' by Gordon Conway. The review said that we need to double global food production by 2050 (Separating the wheat from the chaff by Fred Pearce New Scientist 13/10/12).

Alistair McCaskill wrote a letter (10/11/2012) saying that if today's population stands at 7 billion and is forecast to rise to 9 billion by 2050, why would it take a doubling of food production to feed this extra 2 billion? Fred Pearce answered, and said we have to allow for rising demand - especially for meat.

Clive Semmens replied to this (01/12/12) by saying that it would be much better to try to reduce consumption - especially of meat - in the more affluent. That would be good for the global environment and for health too. He went on to say that he's not advocating vegetarianism, merely moderation.

This is exactly my point of view. It seems to me that trying to double global food production is just not going to work. It doesn't matter how much genetic modification you have, it's simply not going to happen. Making meat more expensive by taxing it and refusing to allow the opening of more factory farms will help enormously. We tax ice cream and put VAT on it because it is a luxury. We should recognize that meat is just as much a luxury.

That is not going to harm poor people. Firstly, the really poor are the 1 in 8 of the global population who go hungry. Secondly, if meat is twice as expensive but people eat half the amount it isn't going to cost them, and it won't affect them aversely in nutritional terms - just the opposite. The same is true of cheese and butter. Meat, cheese and butter are not and can never be cheap calories or cheap protein.

Maize, soya, wheat and anchovies are the cheap calories and protein. That's why they're fed to animals, after all. The almost billion people who go hungry would be quite happy to have extra calories and extra protein from whatever source. They have the knowledge of how to make these things taste wonderful, whether it's traditional Mexican cuisine or the traditional East Asian cusines. The more affluent of the world might desire burgers and other processed foods, but they should be encouraged to move away from the flavours of fat, sugar and salt. I know what I would rather eat, especially now that we know what goes into beefburgers, and I'm not just talking about horse meat.

Life on benefits: starving?

I've just been reading this article in today's Independent. Charlie Cooper tries getting by on £175 a week. He says poverty made him eat lots of pizza. It's a pity that poverty didn't make him go to supermarkets with a notepad and pencil and make him write down the price per kilo of different foods. If he had done so then he might have come to realize that healthy rice and pasta are much cheaper than unhealthy pizza.

Charlie said that some of the time he went hungry. Many people do go without food. So what is the cheapest possible diet that is reasonably healthy? My calculations are that if you eat two thirds of a kilo of long grain rice and one third of a kilo of frozen mixed vegetables, then you will get all the calories that you need in a day, all of the protein, and also your 5 a day.

That would not be an ideal diet, and it certainly would be boring, but you could live off that indefinitely, and it costs 52p per day. I'm not suggesting that poor people should eat just this, but it's better than not eating anything.

One kilo of long grain rice costs 40p (from Lidl and others) and has 3,550 calories (kcals) and 70g of protein. Two thirds of a kilo costs 27p and has 2,367 calories and 47g of protein.

One kilo of frozen mixed vegetables costs 75p (from Sainsbury's) and has 310 calories and 23g of protein. One third of a kilo costs 25p and provides 103 calories and 8g of protein.

Two thirds of a kilo of rice and one third of a kilo of veg together costs 52p, provide 2,470 calories and 55g of protein. Men need 2,500 calories per day and women need 2,000. People need 55g of protein a day. This may astonish some people who think that to get enough protein you need to eat meat, fish, cheese or eggs. Rice and veg are low in protein but people really do not need as much as they think. People in Britain, including poor people, usually eat 85g a day.

Sainsbury's basics frozen mixed vegetables have peas, broccoli, cauliflower and carrot. Peas contain protein, and this protein balances the protein from the rice in terms of amino acids. So, you can be pretty sure that you're getting both the quantity and quality of protein that you need. As far as your '5 a day', you will be getting most of your vitamins and minerals. You don't need to have both vegetables and fruit, vegetables by themselves are good enough.

I think most people can afford 52p a day. What seems to be happening is that people spend their money on expensive rubbishy foods then run out of money and go hungry. If they ate more cheap healthier food then they wouldn't run out of money.

The cheapest pizza I could find is Tesco Everyday Value cheese and tomato pizza. It costs 60p, has 647 calories and 26g of protein. So it is more expensive and has fewer calories.

If someone had slightly more money, then I would suggest porridge for breakfast, a pasta dish for lunch, and a rice dish in the evening. Porridge and pasta aren't much more expensive than rice. Pasta and rice dishes are healthy, but the more cheese, butter and cream that you add the more expensive it is and the less healthy.

If you have more money then you can start adding fruit, some olive or rapeseed oil, and some animal protein. This may sound like a hypothetical exercise, to try and find the least amount of money that it costs to have a reasonably healthy diet. But it is not hypothetical at all. People are going hungry. And they can do something about it with a small amount of effort and information.

nutritional recession hits the UK

On the front page of the Guardian yesterday there was the headline Britain in nutritional recession as rising prices toke toll on diet. The sub-heading was Low-income households shun fresh fruit and veg for processed foods.

The first paragraph of the article said this:-

Austerity Britain is experiencing a nutritional recession, with rising food prices and shrinking incomes driving up the consumption of fatty foods, reducing the amount of fruit and vegetables we buy, and condemning people on the lowest incomes to an increasingly unhealthy diet.

I don't doubt that poorer people are eating more high-fat and processed foods, and fruit and vegetable consumption has dropped. Readers of this blog will know that I dispute the idea that high-fat and processed foods are cheap. This isn't my opinion, anyone can look at the facts. It is easy to calculate the number of calories per penny for a number of foods.

The Guardian has made the claim that poor people can't afford healthy food several times over the years. The mistake they are making is setting up a false dichotomy between fruit and vegetables on the one hand and high-fat processed foods on the other hand. The most important type of food for poorer people should be the starchy staples eg rice, pasta, bread, porridge. These should provide the bulk of the calories consumed. These are by far the cheapest type of food. A kilo of long-grain rice costs 40p. A bowl of rice costs 4 or 5p to make. This type of food isn't even mentioned in the Guardian.

The other thing that is wrong is that, even if you consider vegetables on a calories per penny basis, they are not more expensive than high-fat and processed foods. Sainsbury's sell a bag of mixed vegetables that work out around 4 calories per penny. A Mac Donald's cheeseburger is around 3.5 calories per penny and a Big Mac around 2.5. Frozen vegetables are just as nutritious and more convenient to use than fresh. If you are eating vegetables you don't need fruit as well.

changes in food supply due to climate change

Drought in the US has wiped out 45% of the maize and 35% of the soya bean crop in the worst harvest since 1988. Pig farmers are using more anchovies because maize is now too expensive. Salmon farmers are using more anchovies because warmer seas mean the salmon are growing faster. Anchovies are increasing in price because pig and salmon farmers want more of them, but also because of storms, Peruvian government quotas, and organic farmers wanting more fish meal as fertiliser. Anchovies should not be used for animal feed, let alone fertiliser; it is a complete waste.

Salmon prices have dropped dramatically. Fish oil, used as a nutritional supplement, will increase in price. Burgers will increase in price. Mackerel are being overfished because warmer waters mean that they're moving further north into Icelandic and Faroese waters. All this I have learned from this Guardian article Anchovy price leap causes food industry chain reaction. Elsewhere I have learned that the price of lobsters has plummeted because of warmer seas.

hunger

The issue of hunger has been prominent on our TV screens recently. Yesterday was David Cameron's world-hunger summit. The main purpose of the summit is to is to highlight child malnutrition and its resulting physical stunting as the main problem in world development. There will be discussion of how the worst drought in 60 years in the US mid-west is pushing up global food prices and increasing hunger in Africa. Wheat prices rose by 19% on international markets last month alone.

On Friday there was the first in a three part series of documentaries on ITV1 London about rising food prices in Britain and the effect on poor people. The documentary series is called Tonight: The Food We Eat and part 1 is called The Hunger Shame. It showed a mother who said that she couldn't afford to feed herself until she was able to go to a food bank. I have every sympathy with her but it confirmed what I already believed, that people spend their money on rubbish food that isn't that cheap.

What seemed to be happening with her is that she was cooking her family sausages and buttery mashed potato, and then when she ran out of money she went to the food bank to stock up on tins of frankfurters and packets of biscuits. It isn't surprising that she is overweight. The sorts of food that she is eating are not the cheapest and are full of saturated fat and sugar, as well as salt.

If you believe Michael Mosley's documentary last Monday you might think that this mother's hunger might have done her some good. Horizon: Eat, Fast and Live Longer on BBC2 started by discussing what we already know, that restricting calories can make people live longer. It showed a man in America who eats only 1,600 calories a day.

Then we were told about research into how intermittent fasting may be just as good as continuous calorie restriction. There are different ways that this can be achieved. You could occasionally have a 3-day and 4-night fast where you eat nothing. You could reduce the amount of protein that you eat. You could fast one day and eat normally the next. Or you could eat normally 5 days a week and then fast for 2, although you can have 600 calories per day on your fast days.

What this seems to do is to reduce the amount of Insulin-like Growth Factor 1 (IGF-1) that your body produces. You will age slower and will be less likely to develop cancer. There will also be inprovements in blood pressure, blood glucose and cholesterol.

I'm not going to be doing any fasting. I already try not to eat too much food and I shall continue to do so especially as I had my BMI measured recently and it was on the upper limit of what is healthy. My waist measurement is a couple of inches over what it should be. Mosley said that restricting protein is one way to bring down the level of IGF-1. I already eat considerably less protein than most people. Current estimates of how much we need each day are 55g whereas what we British eat is 85g. So we eat just over one and a half times as much protein as we need.

It's a strange world we live in. Millions of people eat more food than is good for them. Millions of others could eat well on the money they have but have lost the knowledge of what normal food is. They try to continue to eat lots of processed foods high in fat and sugar. Millions have their height stunted by lack of food. The poor can't afford to buy the grains and pulses that could keep them healthy, but the affluent can afford to feed grains and pulses to billions of farm animals so that they can continue their unhealthy high-fat way of eating.

why some people think healthy food is expensive

I have written two posts contradicting people who think that healthy food is expensive and that poor people can't afford healthy food, poor people can't afford to eat healthy food? and more about poverty and food. I have also compiled a table comparing the cheapness of foods in terms of calories per penny. This is an important issue because unemployment is very high now. People need to know how they can best spend their money.

Just recently I have been looking at a web forum where people have been discussing this issue. I can see why some people believe that healthy foods are more expensive. I can see where they are going wrong. Eating healthy food doesn't mean you have to buy organic food or eat wholegrains or any of the expensive stuff.

Let's take one food as an example. White rice. People ask 'What is the healthy alternative to white rice?'. The answer? - brown rice. And brown rice is more expensive than white rice. Therefore the healthy food is more expensive than the unhealthy food. But white rice is the healthier alternative to processed foods. Both brown and white rice are healthier - and both cheaper - than burgers or crisps. So, it's not true to say that healthy foods are more expensive. Here are more points, usually in response to what people wrote on the forum.

• fresh or organic vegetables are more expensive than frozen vegetables, but frozen vegetables are just as good or nearly just as good
• organic foods are more expensive than non-organic foods but you don't need them, if they are healthier then they're not much healthier
• fancy breads are more expensive than a cheap white loaf, but the cheapest form of bread is in the form of chapattis you make at home
• free-range or organic chicken is more expensive than cheap chicken, but not if you eat a smaller amount; people eat far more protein than they need
• free-range or organic eggs are more expensive than cheap eggs, but cheap eggs aren't that much less nutritious, if at all
• cheap cheddar from the supermarket or cheese triangles are cheaper than fancy cheeses from a farmers' market, but all cheeses are much the same in terms of nutrients, cheap cheese isn't less healthy
• tofu may be more expensive than cheap chicken, but you don't need that much protein and the cheapest form of protein will always be beans, peas and lentils
• blueberries and other 'superfoods' are more expensive than more common fruit but you don't need them; you can get most of your vitamins and minerals from vegetables
• fish is often more expensive than meat, but you don't need either
• soya milk is more expensive than cow's milk, but soya milk isn't much healthier than skimmed cow's milk
• fruit juice is more expensive than soft drinks; do what I do and drink water from the tap

Another thing is, you have to ask yourself why is brown rice more expensive than white rice. After all, they don't have to process it so much, and processing costs money, so you would think it would be cheaper. The only thing I can think of is economies of scale. People buy so much white rice that it's produced on a much bigger scale, and people aren't going to buy overpriced rice. If more people bought brown rice then it would be as cheap, or maybe even cheaper, than white rice. Having said that, brown rice can still be cheaper than processed foods, as my comparison table shows. So, I think I am justified in saying that even poor people can buy brown rice.

Other issues that came up in the forum were availability of healthy food and the amount of time needed to prepare healthier foods. These are different issues from affordability, but they're not big problems. I have lived in different parts of London and different parts of England and I have never had a problem with availability. I have lived on council estates. Supermarkets and street markets have always been nearby. I'm sure that if you're a journalist and you can spare the time then you could find a housing estate in Britain where there aren't any supermarkets or street markets nearby, but to pretend that this is representative of how the majority of poor people live is wrong.

As for preparation time, I don't spend hours in the kitchen. I don't soak beans, but although it takes hours for them to soak, you don't need to stand over them while they're soaking. It takes only 15 minutes to cook rice or pasta. Same with lentils or frozen vegetables. You put them in a saucepan, pour on boiling water from the kettle, bring them to the boil and simmer. Pasta sauce and other sauces from a jar are cheap and aren't going to push up the cost of the meal a lot.

People tend to be cash rich and time poor, or time rich and cash poor. Either way you can eat healthy food. If you are cash poor and time poor then you've got a big problem. You have to work out for yourself what you're going to do about that one. But buying burgers and crisps is not the answer. Not only will you be making yourself ill, but you will be wasting your money.

If you wanted to cook elaborate dishes like macaroni cheese then it would take more time, but I don't bother with the complicated and less healthy stuff. If someone buys a cheap macaroni cheese from Iceland, they might think that it would cost more to buy a marginally more healthy one from Marks & Spencer. So what? They might think it would cost more to make one from scratch at home in their kitchen using marginally healthier ingredients, and take a lot more time. So what?

Pasta doesn't need to have cheese added to it. You can get a kilo of pasta for about 60p. It doesn't take much more money to make it palatable. A tomato-based pasta sauce is cheap and healthy. If you think about that then the £1 macaroni cheese doesn't seem so cheap.

If people insist on eating rich food full of cheese and butter and cream then they can do so. Or they can think about what poor people all over the world have been eating for thousands of years, a starchy staple with some pulses and lots of vegetables, flavoured with herbs and some spice. It's cheap, tasty and nutritious, and it doesn't result in ecological or animal welfare problems.

the problem with super farms

There was an interesting article in The Guardian on the 5th of June. Super farms are needed in UK, says leader of National Farmers Union Britain urged to ape countries such as the US and Saudi Arabia and build farms housing tens of thousands of cows or pigs.

 The article states that concerns about large-scale animal farming fall into four categories

1. animal welfare
2. super units destroying small farms and rural communities
3. farms straining soil and water resources and requiring mass transport of chemicals, generating more greenhouse gas pollution
4. such units being unsightly and emitting foul smells

I am concerned with these four things too, but there is something of even greater concern to me. That is that these super farms are a wasteful use of agricultural resources. It might seem like a good idea if British farmers produced more home-grown pork. Currently Britain is 40% self-sufficient in pork. However, for every kilo of pork we produce in Britain, we would need to import several kilos of maize and soya from across the Atlantic.

There are a billion pigs on the planet, compared to 7 billion people, and pigs are fed on a high calorie and high protein diet consisting mostly of maize and soya. These two crops are grown in vast quantitities in America (where they are subsidised), Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. If we had more pigs in Britain we would need to have more ships crossing the Atlantic full of maize and soya. That is not what I call self sufficiency.

It would be much better if the global population of pigs and chickens was cut to, let's say, 10% of what it is today. That would enable us to do three things.

1. It would free up vast quantities of maize and soya for human consumption. Maize and soya can be made very palatable; people have been eating them in different forms for thousands of years.
2. We would be able to grow other grains and other pulses because we wouldn't need so much land for maize and soya.
3. We could have a less intensive form of agriculture that protects topsoil better and requires fewer expensive agricultural inputs such as high nitrogen fertilizer. One simple way of putting the problem is that we have so many farm animals we have to farm them more intensively than we would want, and they eat so much food that we have to grow crops more intensively than we would want.

Another way of putting it is that factory farming is a way of converting a large amount of healthy food (maize, soya, wheat, barley) into a smaller amount of unhealthy food (meat and cheese), and making it more expensive. If you think of a factory farm as a system with inputs and outputs, you get out of it fewer calories and less protein than what you put in. Meat can never be cheap protein, it is soya that is the cheap protein, and we are wasting it.

Of course, people will say that not everybody wants to eat soya. We have to make our minds up what it is that we are trying to achieve. If we don't we will achieve nothing. What is totally unacceptable is for people to say we need GM to 'feed the world', and when we suggest perfectly practical methods of feeding the world (unlike GM which is pie in the sky), the priorities suddenly switch.

One argument that I heard went something like this. Anchovies are caught in vast numbers (overfished in fact) and used to feed farmed salmon. The obvious thing is for people to eat more anchovies and less farmed salmon. That is a practical method of feeding the world that we could start putting into practice right now. But what was the response? I like to have anchovy of my pizza but I am unable to persuade my family likewise, so why not give people what they want?

We can't pretend that our priority is the needs of the poor when really our priority is the whims of the affluent. There are reasons why affluent people tend to want to eat lots of meat, cheese and farmed salmon. It's partly do do with fashion, possibly what Delia said last night on the telly. It's partly to do with the mistaken idea that people need more protein than they actually do. It's partly to do with people wanting to be modern and westernized. It's also because only added value products get advertized.

A starchy staple such as rice or pasta, together with beans and vegetables, and flavoured with herbs and spices, is cheap, tasty and nutritious. These things should be kept cheap whereas meat and cheese should be regarded as luxury items and have VAT put on them. Planning permission for factory farms should be refused. These are practical methods to help feed the world. If we don't do this, nothing will change. GM crops, even if eventually we get one that is more productive, won't change anything. All it will mean is that there will be even more farm animals.

more about poverty and food

This post is a continuation of my previous post where I am trying to dispel the myth that poor people can't afford to eat healthy food. Zoe Williams stated in a recent Guardian article that a Big Mac is good value for money in terms of calories per penny.

We need a certain number of calories per day. If someone ate 3 Big Macs per day for breakfast, lunch and evening meal they would get 1,770 calories. That would be almost enough for a woman but not a man. Women need 1,940 calories per day and men need 2,550 calories per day. 4 Big Macs a day would give someone 2,360 calories per day. That's kind of an average requirement so let's work with that. 4 Big Macs a day would cost £66.92 a week. Job Seekers Allowance for someone aged 16 to 24 is £53.45, and for someone 25 or over £67.50. So a young person would not be able to afford it and an older person would have 58p left over at the end of the week to spend on everything else. And a man still wouldn't be getting enough calories.

I've just looked on the McDonald's site and it says a Big Mac has 490 calories. I'm sure that I saw somewhere that it has 590. I'm going to have to check that, but if it is 490 that supports my case even better. Here it says it could be 590 or even more.

The more you think about it the more you realise how absurd her advice to poor people is. When I was a child I thought that poor people ate fish and chips. When I became poor I realised I could not afford the fish and that even the chips have to be an occasional treat. You cannot get a bag of chips for less than £1.

It should be obvious that if you cook food at home it is likely to be cheaper than a fast food outlet. They have to pay for staff and premises etc and that comes from the price of the food. These foods tend to be highly advertised, the costs of which can make up a good fraction of the price of the foods.

The processing of food costs a certain amount of money. White rice is barely processed and brown rice not at all. So much so that if you spill some of certain brands of brown rice on the ground it will grow into rice plants (I know I've tried it). Brown rice is more expensive than white rice, but I expect that is because of 'economies of scale'. If people ate as much brown rice as they do white then it might be as cheap or even cheaper.

Meat can never be cheap food. Cheaper forms of meat will come from factory farms where the animals are fed maize and soya, and some wheat and barley. So therefore meat will always be more expensive than maize, soya, wheat and barley. We can eat all these things.

Zoe Williams thinks that people like me 'secretly yearn for a Big Mac'. I am not a vegetarian, although most of my food is vegetarian (vegan in fact). When I want fast food I will have a bacon butty or a salt beef sandwich. I might do that once a week. Big Macs are boring food.

In her article, Zoe Williams mentions the case of a grandmother who fed her grandchildren for five weeks on nothing but eggs, beans, chip and toast. This is supposed to be an example of what poor people can afford. This doesn't really support her argument, however, for two reasons. Firstly, because it's not a particularly bad diet. Secondly, because it is easy to see how the grandmother could have made improvements without additional cost.

This diet is low in saturated fat. Eggs might have cholesterol in them but it doesn't increase blood cholesterol. Eggs are a good source of protein and micronutrients. The main problem is the lack of vegetables and fruit. It is true (as Zoe Williams says) that vegetables don't provide many calories per penny. However, if you use grains to provide most of your calories in the form of starch, then vegetables can bulk it out so you feel fuller. And they have lots of micronutrients. Vegetables are cheap.

There are many ways to cook potatoes. Boiled, baked, mashed, or as bubble-and-squeak. It's not going to cost more to cook your potatoes in different ways each day. Vegetable oil for deep frying usually has too much omega-6 and more calories than you'd want.

By beans, I assume she means baked beans. There are other beans ready cooked from tins. There are many other beans bought dried in packets. There are other pulses like chick peas, peas and lentils. Pulses are high in protein and starch.

Toast is one way to eat wheat. Wheat is consumed in many forms; bread, pasta, couscous, cracked wheat and bulgur. There are other grains, such as rice, maize, oats and barley. Eggs are just one of the cheap ways to get animal protein.

My guess is that the grandmother was putting butter on her toast, in which case it wouldn't have been the low saturated fat diet it might seem. The best quality olive oil is cheaper than even the cheapest butter.

So there is no need for a cheap diet to be a boring one. Or an unhealthy one.

See my table comparing cheapness of foods.

poor people can't afford to eat healthy food?

There has been another article in the Guardian stating that poor people cannot possibly afford to eat healthy food. They do this from time to time, there was one written a while ago by Julie Bindel. I know it is not true because I am a poor person and I eat healthy food. These are the three main points in the article.

1. Cheap foods are fatty, and fat stops people from being hungry. Vegetables can't do that, and organic vegetables are especially poor value in this respect. There is nothing cheaper than fatty foods to stop hunger.
2. People battling food scarcity tend to overeat when food is available.
3. Poor people have to buy food that their children will eat. If children don't eat the food they are given then it will be wasted, and people can't afford to waste food.

I shall go through each point one by one.

1. The cheapest foods are not fatty. It is wrong for Zoe Williams - who wrote the article - to state that the choice for poor people is between fatty foods and vegetables. The choice is between fatty foods and things like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes and beans. Vegetables can bulk out these and so are valuable, in addition to providing vitamins and minerals. 1 kg of rice costs 40p from Lidl and provides 3,470 calories. A Big Mac costs £2.39 and provides 590 calories, more than half of them from fat. I have done some simple calculations, shown towards the end of this post, and it works out that healthy foods are on average about ten times cheaper than the unhealthy foods that Zoe Williams mentions.

2. I know what it's like to be on Job Seekers Allowance and to run out of money at the end of a fortnight before the next payment. You can buy 1kg of rice for 40p from Lidl and keep it in the back of a cupboard for if you might need it. Or use the loose change in your pocket or ask a neighbour to lend you 40p. You can live off that for days if necessary, especially if you have a few other ingredients in the cupboard. With a few beans and not much else you could make Rice and Peas, which is a traditional West Indian dish, or another rice dish. There's no reason for people to be 'battling food scarcity'. People with children have more money than single people on Job Seekers Allowance because the previous government was so keen to lessen child poverty.

3. When I was a child I had to eat what was provided for me or go without. In most parts of the world that is still true. Children don't starve themselves if they are not allowed to eat only their favourite foods all the time. If they leave food it can be eaten by adults and not wasted. It's wrong to think that children don't like healthy food. Baked beans on toast is reasonably healthy and is something that children like.

To understand the relationship between food and health, it is important to realise that we are talking about three separate things. They are not equally important.

1. Too many calories. Too much fat, sugar and salt. Too many calories results in obesity, which contributes towards diabetes, heart disease and strokes. Saturated fat contributes towards heart disease and strokes. Sugar and refined starch contribute towards diabetes. Salt contributes towards heart disease and strokes.

If people ate 10% less food their health would improve and they would save 10p in every £1. They can do better than that by getting a smaller proportion of the calories they eat from fat and sugar and more from the starchy staples. They can also increase the quality of the fat they eat as well as decreasing the quantity. Saturated fats should be avoided, but some unsatured fats can be a problem too. Trans fats should be avoided wherever possible. Most vegetable oils contain more omega-6 than is healthy. Omega-9 (also called monounsaturated) rich oils are good. Olive oil is high in omega-9. You may think that poor people can't afford olive oil but in fact both Lidl and Aldi have cheap olive oils that have won a taste test. Extra virgin olive oil from Lidl or Aldi provides a lot more calories per penny than a Big Mac or crisps. Omega-3 rich oils are good too.

2. Too little fruit and vegetables. There is evidence that eating fruit and vegetables helps with heart disease and cancer. They contain vitamins and minerals that are needed in small quantities. Some of these are antioxidants. They also contain other things that are valuable, such as lycopene. Beta-carotene (for example) can be obtained cheaply from carrots or green vegetables, or slightly more expensively from sweet potatoes or mangoes. This is why we are told that we should eat 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day.

3. Organic food. The reason why people originally chose organic food was because nobody knows the long-term cumulative effects of small amounts of pesticides eaten every day. Pesticides and other agro-chemicals have been tested on animals, but animals don't live very long, vary in how they react to a substance, and don't have a cocktail of different substances in their bodies which interact with each other. Also, people are unhappy with certain aspects of modern agriculture, which could be ecological or animal welfare issues.

Today people may say they prefer the flavour, and there is some evidence that orgainically grown vegetables can be slightly higher in some vitamins. It is not essential for health for people to eat organically grown products.

What is important is that people reduce the amount of calories, fat, sugar and salt. It can save you money too. Eating more fruit and vegetables is of secondary importance. Eating organic vegetables is not important. So when Zoe Williams says that poor people can't afford organic carrots, or that they are not good value for money, she is not saying anything important.

People like Zoe Williams seem to think they are defending poor people against accusations of sloth. I don't think many people are making such an accusation. I'm certainly not doing that. I treat poor people the same as everyone else. People can use information to improve their lives. It isn't helping poor people to tell them that they can't possibly afford to eat healthy food so they might as well not try. It's not true. Such an attitude can only cause a large amount of ill health and suffering.

Poor people aren't just the British working class. They are also people from other continents where poverty is much greater and where people know how to cook cheap food. I have nothing to teach someone from Africa or India in that respect. Poor people are also many middle class people who have recently lost their jobs and are trying to survive on Job Seekers Allowance. We all need to know how to survive these difficult times, and people like Zoe Williams aren't helping.

These are two key statements made by Zoe Williams in her article. I have shown in this post that they are both factually incorrect, and below I have done the calculations to prove it.

"It's more palatable to blame diabetes on lifestyle than accept the fact that, on a penny-per-calorie basis, a Big Mac is simply cheaper"

"Once you accept crap food is an economic choice you have to accept that 24,000 deaths a year aren't related to sloth"

First let's calculate the number of calories per penny for some healthy foods such as rice and olive oil.

White long grain rice from Lidl costs 40p for 1kg. 1kg of rice is 3,470 calories (kcals). That works out as about 87 calories per penny.

White basmati rice from Lidl costs £10.99 for a 10kg bag. That works out at about 31.5 calories per penny.

Italian short grain brown rice from Whole Foods Market in Kensington costs £1.79 per kilo. That works out (assuming the same number of calories per kg as above) at about 19.5 calories per penny. It's probably more than that because I have been using the figure of 347 calories per 100g (read off the back of a packet of basmati) when the figure (looking on different places on the web) could be 350 or 360 or even more.

All of the types of rice above have a medium GI and so don't cause higher blood glucose and insulin levels that contribute towards diabetes. Some forms of rice have a high GI and are not so good.

Extra virgin olive oil from Lidl costs £2.25 for 750ml. Olive oil has 823 calories per 100ml. That works out as about 27.5 calories per penny.

Now let's compare this with the unhealthy forms of food mentioned in the article.

A Big Mac costs £2.39 and has 590 calories. That works out as about 2.5 calories per penny.

A McDonald's cheeseburger costs 99p and has 295 calories. That works out at just under 3 calories per penny.

A packet of Walkers ready salted crisps costs 30p for 25g. Each pack has 134 calories. That works out as about 4.5 calories per penny.

It can clearly be seen that all of the healthy foods above provide more calories per penny than any of the unhealthy foods. Even brown rice from Kensington High Street and extra virgin olive oil will assuage hunger pangs for less money than either a Big Mac or some crisps. Not only is extra virgin olive oil cheaper than a Big Mac in terms of calories per penny, it is more than 11 times cheaper.

Of course, the number of calories per penny (or penny-per-calorie as Zoe Williams would put it) is not the most important criterion for healthy food. But she has talked about how much it costs to overcome hunger. She believes that Big Macs and crisps are better for that and thinks that is why poor people eat these things. She's wrong.

I wouldn't expect anyone to eat just rice, there are so many ways to have rice with other things, including other cheap things. For example, rice with dal and vegetable curry. Dal is an Indian dish made with lentils (about 19.5 calories per penny). We're not talking austerity here. I would prefer to eat food from around the world than foods whose main flavours are fat, sugar and salt. I'm not expecting people to be vegetarian or vegan, there are cheap ways of eating animal protein too.

Even organic food can be cheaper than McDonald's or crisps. Lidl sell a 500g bag of organic whole durum wheat farfalle pasta for 84p (about 20 calories per penny). If you average out the calories per penny of the 6 healthy foods and the 3 unhealthy foods mentioned above then the unhealthy foods are about ten times more expensive.

Talk about poor people should be educated, it looks as if Zoe Williams needs to be educated. Talk about sloth, couldn't Zoe Williams be bothered to do a few simple calculations before saying something incorrect? Does she not think that the health of poor people is important? Has she not considered the effects of her words? Zoe Williams sees things in black-and-white. Either poor people are eating organic carrots or they're eating Big Macs. Either the poor are are totally responsible for what happens to them or they have no responsibility at all. The truth as always lies somewhere inbetween these two extremes.

See my table comparing cheapness of foods.

the Foresight report into future food supply

Last month a report by scientists was published which attempted to find solutions to the problem of feeding an ever growing global population. The Foresight report, Global Food and Farming Futures suggest a number of different ways.

1. allowing more genetically modified crops
2. avoiding food waste
3. more spending on agricultural research

The report doesn't seem to be recommending that less food in the form of grains and soya should be fed to animals. The article in the Independent newspaper states "This urbanisation in developing nations will be coupled with an increase in wealth and a shift towards diets rich in meat and dairy produce, which require more farmland to produce compared to more vegetarian diets." Yet there isn't any suggestion that this shift should be countered.

In fact 'grain, roots, tubers and pulses' are termed 'poor-quality food', which is nonsense. Grains and pulses, together with vegetables and fruit, should form the basis of a healthy diet. Animal protein isn't necessary at all.

To say that genetic modification is going to be the solution to the problem of world hunger is like saying that nuclear fusion is going to be the solution to energy demand and carbon dioxide production. I hope power stations that use nuclear fusion can be built in the future, and I support governments spending billions of dollars on research into it, but the fact is that it might never happen. There are no genetically modified crops that are higher yielding than conventional crops yet. Just as we need wind turbines and other renewable energy sources now, so too we need non-GM solutions to food production now.

Not allowing big animal farms such as the proposed mega-dairy at Nocton would be a start. Getting rid of all of them is a goal for the future. We could put VAT on all meat where the animals have been fed on grain and soya. This would mean that grain prices would not continue to increase as much as they have done, giving the poorer people of the world the chance to feed their families.