Recently, Ive found myself believing two opposite things at the same time: Im sure that food in this country is too cheap but I also know its far too expensive.
We live in a stark, black and white world. These days people are totally for something, or fully against it. There are no nifty shades of grey. Nuance and complexity are boring. Nevertheless, the whole pot of truth still lies at the end of a technicolour rainbow.
Two recent threads on Twitter have pushed me further into this puzzle. The first from a Scottish farmer friend, Jock Gibson, of award-winning butcher Macbeths. Last week, he explained exactly how a whole lamb is priced up to an outraged supermarket customer who was livid about paying 30 for a leg joint.
He showed how even at that price the returns to the farmer and butcher are mean. The fact that Tesco could even begin to charge such a low price for that cut was because it was also likely selling it as a loss leader.
Cheaper imported meat keeps the price of lower welfare and worse, climate or environmental damage, firmly off-label.
The second thread was from the inspiring poverty campaigner Jack Monroe, also know as the Bootstrap Cook. Reading the latest figures showing the official inflation rate had soared to 5.4 per cent, she went through her receipts, kept over years of writing budget recipes.
She quickly saw that for people forced to buy the cheapest of food, prices have rocketed up to 344 per cent in just under a year.
Despite the Office for National Statistics taking the point and agreeing to look again at how it calculates the figures, the benefits people depend on are not suddenly going to rise 344 per cent. Food banks litter our proud country, which officially enjoys the third most affordable food in the world.
Sometimes we put too high a store on being consistent. The idea that two opposite things could both be true does not compute. But often things we believe most strongly arent the whole story and, so, just like in order to properly enjoy a good book or film, we are better off suspending our disbelief.
Consumers
Ive argued in these pages for higher food prices, even for consumers to be taxed for buying artificially cheap food. Yet we have farmers who cant make ends meet without eroding the planet, consumers who cant afford to eat and retailers fighting permanent price wars to survive.
Im left with the feeling that no one is winning. A particularly depressing shade of grey.
Ancient agriculture first allowed people to produce a food surplus, build cities, learn trades and acquire knowledge. It is literally the foundation of human civilisation.
Modern agriculture has saved billions of peoples lives. Billions who would have died, never been born, be sick or starving without nitrogen fertilisers, pesticides and mechanisation. Possibly even you reading this now.
While its fashionable to slag off industrial agriculture, maybe we did unwittingly swap a firing squad for a slow-acting poison instead? Anyone rational would probably take the same deal again. But what do we do now?
Im not the first to say that food poverty is just another name for poverty, or that cheap food shouldnt cost the Earth. The cost of living squeeze isnt just food either, energy prices are also rising.
Energy and fuel are heavily taxed, whereas food is subsidised. Thats a lot of money being spent to go round and round in circles achieving little.
Therefore, Im left with the shocking thought that perhaps the solution to all this isnt a new Environmental Land Management scheme after all. It isnt a beefed up Grocery Code Adjudicator, more supermarket competition, or tough import bans.
It is more fundamental. The answers lie in reducing inequality, making prices reflect true costs and providing a better welfare safety net.
Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses farming is political.
