The Cost of Cheap Food

Here is an article I wrote for the student paper on Cheap food.

As a student, living on the breadline is part of the lifestyle. Yet with the recession biting at the bank balance, food prices have sky rocketed resulting in an increased demand for budget food lines, providing affordable food for a fraction of the cost. Despite the financial benefit experienced by opting to shop at cheaper supermarkets and purchasing budget lines , a recent Dispatches on Channel 4 revealed how all is not as it seems, with many cheaper products containing significantly lower nutritional levels than the higher priced goods. This begs the question “Do we really know what goes into budget line food, and do we care?

According to Channel 4’s Dispatches over a third of shoppers have switched to budget line foods, causing an increase of 42% for the cheaper brand lines. The upsurge in popularity of cheaper supermarkets such as German owned Lidl and Aldi, is no doubt a consumer response to the pinch of the credit crunch. Yet in opting for cheaper supermarkets, and the more affordable brand lines of the big 4 (Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons, and Asda), does lower price necessarily mean lower quality?

The Dispatches documentary highlighted how especially in meat products such as Chicken, Sausages, and Pies, significantly lower nutritional values can be found, and that the Supermarkets utilise industry tricks to make us think we are getting more than we paid for. When investigating Tesco’s value line chicken breasts, it was found that they consisted of 60% chicken, with the remaining 40% being water, salt, and dextrose, injected via syringes to increase the overall size of the product. The same story can be applied to value line sausages, with an average of 40% meat in the value line ranges across the supermarkets. The majority of the content is connective tissue, contributing no nutritional value whatsoever to the product. The programme also highlighted how by just increasing the price by 1p, the meat content in sausages can be increased by 15%, which would make only the modest of changes to the supermarkets already huge profit margins.

It seems that the meat products are mostly affected by low nutritional content, with fruit and vegetables being low cost due to their short sell by dates, not nutritional content. The only exception to this was Tomatoes. The cheaper ranges contain far less Vitamin B12, used for production of blood and maintenance of nerves, as well as far lower Lichopene, an antioxidant used to help prevent prostate cancer.

The weekly shopping for the student house I live in is a prime example of the need to save money, with all our shopping being done at the local Aldi, cutting our weekly bill by up to £50. We have maintained the same meals and we all feel that the taste is just as good. The main thing for us and for many people who have switched to budget line foods, is that although it may not be as high a quality as more expensive products, it is still food on the table every evening. So this brings us about the question, Do we really care? It seems that we prefer to remain in the dark, when considering the nutritional value of cheaper foods, as a 3^rd year Drama Student supports;

“As a student, cheap food is part of the lifestyle. As long as it looks and tastes edible, why not buy cheaper?”

So it seems that students in general are just happy to have food on the table, and that in the case of cheap food, ignorance is bliss.