Not so long ago, some were arguing that cheap food was a problem in Britain. We’re unlikely to hear such complaints now that food inflation remained at 17.3 per cent in June, not far off its peak of 19.2 percent in March. Is this a blip? An economist from PwC thinks not and has declared that the ‘era of cheap food has probably come to an end in the UK’. If so, this will have several serious implications.
Just four years ago, a commission set up in 2019 by the left-leaning think tank the RSA claimed that cheap and unhealthy food was causing a public health crisis and contributing to environmental destruction. ‘Our own health and the health of the land are inextricably intertwined,’ it added, high-mindedly, but ‘in the last 70 years this relationship has been broken’.
Cheap food was never a problem – to claim that was the ultimate first world problem
Cheap food, we are told, was bringing misery on farm animals, ruining the soil through over-intensive grazing and everything else. If
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