Aross Europe, families have been eating the most traditional meals of the year – the great blow-out that for most of us is the key ritual of Christmas, the New Year, the Feast of the Epiphany and the winter solstice. A stroll down a European shopping street these days might tell a visitor that our food culture has become dull and homogenised, that we’re a continent of burger and pizza eaters, cappuccino and cola drinkers, busy hunger-fixers like everyone else. But we still eat nine out of 10 meals at home and there, at celebration time, all the glorious differences of the European table still thrive.
We asked Newsweek readers across Europe what they serve up for the party season: it was quite a feast. The British ate turkey and plum pudding, while across Germany and eastern Europe there were spicy sausages and roasted carp; in most Italian homes there are usually seven or eight traditional dishes, from cappelletti – pasta parcels – in broth to roast salt cod. On tables in Denmark there were roast pork, and across all the Baltic states there were sweet and spicy pickled herring. Most Spanish families got through at least one leg of acorn-fed, air-dried mountain ham. Everywhere there is sugar and cake: panettone, plum pudding, stollen, gingersnaps, chocolates, and meringues. And so it has been, at midwinter in Europe, for thousands of years: we consume what we’ve worked so hard to get, and store up energy for the hard months ahead.
There’s one other common denominator across Europe: the mid-winter feast was cheaper – if you wanted it to be – than any winter solstice celebration in history. There’s choice that would be unthinkable to most of our great-grandparents – whether you’re buying an organic goose at £16 a kilo or the £5 lobster that British supermarkets were trumpeting in December. Thrifty or lavish, we all are now guests at the discounted, buy-one-get-one-free year-round cheap food feast, eating more than we need and paying less for it – as a proportion of our incomes – than our grandparents did, or their parents before them. This, it turns out, is not entirely a good thing.
FALSE ECONOMIES
Outside our festive feasting, we’re a continent that is broadly similar in food spending and tastes. Some national clichés turn out to be true – the Germans, with their 300 types of bread, spend more on flour and grains than anyone else, while the British spending on sugar outstrips any other European nation except Turkey. But it’s not the French who eat the most cheese – that’s the Greeks (31kg to the French 19.6kg). Nor is it the Swiss who drink all the milk: that falls to the Irish.
We are devoted consumers of the things that tax the planet highest. Generally, Europeans are cutting back on meat and fish, but these are still by far the most expensive item in our shopping baskets. Germans believe they eat a lot of meat but the French eat significantly more, while the Spanish eat a stunning amount of fish – twice as much as anyone else – and the Norwegians spend far more than any others in the continent on everything.
That’s not because of greed, but the fact that Norway is a shockingly expensive place to eat or drink. Government figures state that dairy, bread and meat prices are 54-80% higher than in the rest of Europe. In our survey of Newsweek readers, we asked families to price the main dish at a recent family meal. Most cost between €2 and €4 per head – the Norwegians’ were €7.50.
Norway can afford the welfare and other support that cushions these prices, and it is also one of Europe’s leanest countries. Only 10% of Norwegians are obese, compared to 26% of people in Britain. And in that strange statistical gap lies an intriguing debate about the link between cheap food and poor health, the phenomenon of the “malnourished obese”, and the rise of food banks at a time when food is historically cheap. That conversation leads, inexorably, to a difficult question: should we be paying more for our food for our own good?
Tim Lang, professor of food policy at London’s City University puts it plainly: “Food in Britain and much of Europe is so cheap and so plentiful that people now over-consume and mal-consume: we have very little under-nutrition, but we have the catastrophic rise of non-communicable diseases that are largely diet-related. Diabetes, gallstones, cardiovascular disease, 30% of the cancers.”
There’s a host of other ills beyond poor health associated with cheap food: waste, environmental damage, poor health and the degradation of Europe’s farm economy. Lang says: “For the whole of the modern age, politicians and businessmen have pursued the goal of cheap food as a good thing, a way to keep wages down. But the industrialisation to produce cheap food has directly led to the environmental calamity of climate change.” A recent UN report stated that the greenhouse gases emitted by food production exceeded those of all of the world’s transport system.
For environmental groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth the toll exacted by the drive to produce ever-cheaper food has come to the forefront of their campaigning: “The supermarket-led race to the bottom on prices is bad for consumers and our environment as it forces farmers – here and overseas – into impossible choices: whether to farm fairly and sustainably and ethically . . . or make a profit. Existing problems with pollution, soil erosion, food scares and loss of vital natural services will get worse and ultimately affect prices and choice in the longer term,” says Vicki Hird of Friends of the Earth.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Food in the rich world is now cheaper than at any time in human history. It is cheaper in Europe than anywhere else, apart from the United States.
Broadly, we in western Europe spend about half what we did, in terms of overall expenditure, on food compared with 30 years ago. The average is around 15% of all spending, compared with the 45% that’s the norm in a country like Pakistan or Egypt. But within the statistics is a story of significant gaps in food prices and expenditure.
As you’d expect, food prices rise the richer a country is. But the amount spent on food as a proportion of all spending drops – a phenomenon known as Engel’s Law, after the 19th-century economist. So in eastern Europe food prices are two-thirds of what they are in Germany; but while in Ukraine 37% of all expenditure is on food, in Germany the figure is about 11%. These differences tell us a lot about the negative impact of cheap food.
Few British shoppers will believe it, but food is startlingly cheap in the UK – even cheaper than for our near neighbours. The British spend 15% less than the western European average – our €1,611 each per year on food for home eating is about the same as the Greeks spend, despite the fact that the average Briton earns more than twice as much.
The average French person spends €2,237 on food every year, 38% more than the British. The British, in fact, at 11.4%, spend less of their total household expenditure on food than any other large country in the world, except the United States. Britain’s poorest spend about the same (16%) as the western European average.
This will come as a big surprise to most Britons, who, if you ask them, see food as a major cost that has been getting much more expensive. It’s true that British food prices have risen faster than inflation and more than in the rest of Europe in the years since the financial crisis of 2007. But Britons have reacted by buying cheaper food and less of it. Why? “Much of the explanation behind UK households’ relatively low expenditure on food lies with supermarket price wars. For instance recent price wars over milk – four pints of milk now often retail for £1 – which have left milk often retailing below cost price,” says Sarah Boumphrey, head of strategic, economic and consumer insight at market researchers Euromonitor.
British supermarkets habitually “loss lead” with products, fuelling price wars and using their power to force producers to lower their prices. Discounting wasn’t invented in Britain: Aldi and Lidl, the chains now challenging traditional supermarkets all over Europe with a “pile it high, sell it cheap” strategy, began in Germany. But in several other European countries, selling at below cost price has been illegal, and other price supports for producers have survived. As we’ll see, discounted food may have a role to play in poor health.
The most striking thing in the statistics is the difference in the price of meat. This also came up again and again in our anecdotal survey of readers. Mimi McGarry is a mother of three, a German married to a Briton, who lives in Berlin but whose job frequently takes her to London. “Meat is so much more expensive in Germany. Lamb, or roast chicken – we buy free range, and in Germany it is easily twice as much.”
Price comparisons bear that out – especially with beef, where ordinary ground beef for mince or hamburgers can cost four times as much in western Europe (€5 a kilo for food-quality ground beef in UK, against €20 in a Spanish supermarket, our research showed). Cheap beef has of course been the subject of major scandals in Britain, and the suspicion remains in many consumers’ minds that good quality meat just can’t be provided that cheaply without damaging agriculture and consumers’ health.
In November, 70% of British supermarket chicken was found to be contaminated with campylobacter, a type of bacteria spread by poor hygiene in processing. It is Britain’s biggest cause of food poisoning – affecting 280,000 and killing 100 a year. There’s no data on campylobacter contamination across the rest of Europe. But the 2013 scandal where donkey and horse meat from eastern Europe was found in beef burgers and other meals was largely a British and Irish affair – the two western European countries where the price of meat is lowest.
In one supermarket aisle only does Britain buck the notion that it enjoys the cheapest food of western Europe. That’s vegetables, where we spend more than most of our neighbours. “This could be linked to British consumers penchant for out-of-season vegetables, and also the high proportion of vegetable imports – per capita imports of vegetables are much higher in the UK than in France for example, although not Germany),” says Sarah Boumphrey, head of consumer insight at Euromonitor. A key to the conundrum is the British taste for bagged fresh salad, even in the depths of winter. By weight, it is one of food retail’s most expensive items. “Frankly, you can sell fresh vegetables and salad at any price you like to the British,” a supermarket senior manager once told me.
Urban consumers have little idea about the relationship between seasons and price, or what to do with vegetables once they have them. Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket chain, revealed in 2013 that 68% of bagged salads is thrown away, half of it by the store, half in the home. Professor Gad Frankel of Imperial College London, points out that though we buy them to make us feel more healthy, salads labelled “ready to eat” are a major cause of E. coli and salmonella poisoning.