‘Healthy’ food is cost prohibitive for many families
Someone has finally realised that the cost of a ‘healthy’ diet is prohibitive for some people. Will wonders never cease?
A study recently published in The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health found that a ‘healthy’ diet would cost 40% of the disposable income of a welfare-dependent family.
40%.
And when you consider the cost of rental accommodation (which a majority of welfare-dependent families live in), that is a HUGE chunk of their income. And no, public housing (with its reduced rental) is not always an option, the waiting lists are ridiculously long and low income earners do not always qualify for public housing assistance despite earning marginally more than what welfare recipients are paid). I don’t know about New Zealand but rental here (in my state at least) is shocking. There is little available and what is available costs an arm and leg (and the soul of your first born child). Even with the rent assistance payment offered by Centrelink (our social security/welfare payment department), rental payments can take up 50% or more of each welfare payment. So if ‘healthy’ food is taking up another 40%, that would leave 10% for clothing, car costs (or public transport costs), medications, entertainment, utilities, school expenses, sporting fees and every other living cost you can possibly think of. Understanding that welfare payments aren’t exactly enormous, that 10% left after accommodation and food costs would not amount to much at all. Probably about $30-40 for an individual, for families it would depend on how many children etc. But either way, it wouldn’t be much.
I was just thinking about this the other day, when it occurred to me — but of course. “Fat taxes” on cheap, high-calorie foods don’t do much of anything except punish poor people who depend on those foods to get enough to eat.
I don’t care who you are; getting ENOUGH to eat always trumps the quality of the food you choose. Besides which, at least in North America, lots of poor people live in “food deserts” where there are no accessible grocery stores with fresh produce, etc. in the first place.
So, if the government is supposedly so invested in getting everyone to “eat healthy,” why not subsidize “healthy” foods, and make them more available to everyone?
It would be nice if they one day woke up to the fact that study after study has shown that there is no really great benefit, as in reduction in occurrences of various diseases or mortality rates, in eating in a particular way. The huge 8-year study of nearly 50,000 women showed that those who ate the least fat & the ‘healthiest’ diets did not weigh less, get fewer diseases, or live longer than those who ate whatever way they wished. The ‘rules’ of ‘healthy eating’ are completely arbitrary & do not have a lot of solid scientific evidence to support them. For instance, virtually no one hears about, because they don’t like to publicize it, studies showing no difference in health or mortality rates between those who eat one or two servings of vegetables & fruits per day & those eating five or more. And I would also like to point out that potatoes are not only a starch, but a very nutritious vegetable, so they DO count, as do the vegetables in pasta sauces, etc. I do get tired of people sneering at perfectly nutritious foods & calling them ‘junk’. I grew up right around the poverty line, have spent my whole life hovering in that neighborhood, as do my younger son & his family, & I soon will be living on a fixed income, & what counts is having the necessities of life, & that includes enough food to fill your belly & as much variety as you can afford & as you like. Malnutrition can be a big problem (speaking as an American living in Maine, one of our poorest states) for older people in particular & anyone with a very low income, so I intend to concentrate on spending my ‘golden years’ getting enough to eat on a regular basis, without worrying about what the government or any other nanny thinks of the way I am eating.
I don’t know about low-cost housing in Australia, but here in the US, it’s usually in areas where there aren’t a lot of grocery stores. What few grocery stores there are don’t carry a wide variety of fresh vegetables and fruits at affordable prices either (at least, that’s the way it is in larger cities, small towns are better, but then you only have one, maybe two, grocery stores to choose from). Not to mention, in the US, food stamps don’t cover anything that isn’t food, even if it is used in the house (like personal hygiene items and household cleaning products), so all of that also has to come out of whatever cash is left over (and if you have a pet, forget it, pet food and litter is another expense not covered).
It’s no wonder that people who live under/at/just above the poverty level can’t afford a ‘healthy’ diet.
I was just saying this over on another blog. When I feed my family hotdogs and macaroni for dinner (with a side of frozen broccoli) it is not because I don’t know any better, for gosh sakes. If the month ends without me scrounging change to buy a gallon of milk for the baby it has been a banner freaking month. I try my best, truly, but sometimes the deck is stacked against parents and families trying to provide.
This is so true. The cheap food such as McD is always the worst for you. Meanwhile the organic markets are only accessible for the rich.
This is the crux of the matter, really. Manipulating food prices is a very good way to make money. Raising food prices is particularly advantageous to the middle-classes, who can easily afford to spend a little more on food and most benefit from the increased profit margins. Big food businesses deal in large quantities with small profit margins. So the middle-class will demonise any cheap or efficiently produced foodstuffs and instead favour foods with high markups. That this disadvantages the poor, particularly the poor in third world countries, is not often discussed.
Poor people will often require higher calorific intakes than those with more sedentary occupations. So cheap, high calorie food is considered debased. Being able to subsist on a low-calorie diet is a way of establishing that one does not need to engage in physical labour, and is of high status.
It goes on and on. Food choices are almost entirely about social status and class issues. Foods that the predominantly middle-class media considers ‘bad’ or ‘unhealthy’ are usually those that are aimed at and consumed by people of perceived lower status.
But the truth is that all food sustains you and gives you life. So all food is good, by definition.
Not to mention, the further you get from cities, the less accessible fresh food is. I live in a small town in the most densely populated state in Victoria – but I have to drive nearly an hour to get fresh fruit and vegetables. The ones in my town’s tiny supermarket are disgusting, and expensive. I can and do grow some of my own food, but that’s not really an option for people in even more remote communities in harsher climates, who have far less access to good quality food that I do.
@Patsy
studies showing no difference in health or mortality rates between those who eat one or two servings of vegetables & fruits per day & those eating five or more.
But they do show a difference between people who eat less than one serving of vegetables and fruit a day, and those who eat one or two or more. When food only comes once a week (or once a month in some areas of Central Australia), getting any fruit and vegetables that aren’t deep fried potatoes is a problem. Why would you spend $5 on two not-very-good bananas when you can buy enough chips for the whole family for the same price?