The True Cost of Food

The Sustainable Food Trust is an organisation I have recently come across which is commited to improve the way we account for and prodcuce food. I urge you to have a look at their site if you are able, and particularly to look at their page on “True Cost Accounting”. If however now is not a time you have for browsing and clicking through to other sites, then here is a small video of theirs to help.

Basically, it seems that accounting the true cost of food looks at more than just the production costs. It looks at the way it effects your body and what that might mean long term on health costs; it looks at the way production effects the environment – and how that might effect public health costs and the future costs of soil regeneration/artificial pollination etc; it looks at the costs of transport of all the various parts of the product – and includes carbon costings as well a basic financial costs. … What is does is give us a true picture of how our eating effects the earth we live in.

And this means that a packet of biscuits, made with refined sugar (from cane grown in the carribean), palm oil (from deforested areas of Borneo), and flour (from grain flown across the Atlantic) suddenly doesn’t cost less than a fresh, organic and locally grown apple. .. which seems logical and right.

Before I started this blog, I hadn’t heard of True Cost Accounting. … maybe I should have. I’m not sure if it is my fault for walking around with my eyes closed, and not reading the Financial Times (being not much interested in financial news) or whether it is not being publicised for (cynical thought warning) ‘big-corp profit’ reasons. I’d love a conversation about True Cost Accounting, and how it works, how it is worked out, whether it is reasonable etc. I will look into it more for myself for now …

I do wonder if NHS England, Public Health England, the food banks, the poverty charities, the health charities, maybe ought to look into it too? … and maybe it is something we could consider campaigning about together for the good of all. Just pondering…