Originally published at: UK Prices soar as food inflation hits record highs | Boing Boing
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Brexit delivers!
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It’s incredible. I can see month-to-month a difference in my Ocado grocery bills. I go through tinned tomatoes and passata like a consuming flame; I’m always buying them. The cost has doubled from 75p-80p all the way up to £1.50-1.75 for a single tin. Most of that increase has been in the past six months. Passata costs the same, but the bottles are half the size. I used to buy bags of dried beans and lentils for 75p, now the same size is £2. The bag of mixed nuts my wife buys for her work snacks cost £8 last month, this month I paid £11.50. Just about the only thing I buy on the regular that hasn’t skyrocketed are clementines, salad, and cucumbers. Although bagged salad is 25g lighter, and there’s one less clementine per bag.
Rant over.
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In my little town, our supermarket is the Co-op.
cooperative my arse.
A loaf of bread used to be £1.10, £2.00 now.
Milk has near doubled.
Eggs, when there are any on the shelves - also doubled.
But it’s not just food (and dog food). Toilet rolls have increased in price by 60%, give or take.
This has all happened within 12 months.
Oh well, time to turn off the heating.
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We’ve been lucky, we have both a great dairy and organic food box here. Their prices have gone up, but not nearly so much as the grocery stores. Makes you wonder what’s missing from the chain that’s making up the difference?
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We’ve got a food bank.
We’ve also got a “Warm Space” at the local community centre that is open to all each Thursday between 12 and 3pm.
For the other 165 hours of the week, we make our own entertainment.
For the record - not having a snide at you, @abides, in case that’s the way my rant seems.
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If the crops were bad everywhere, are other countries getting hit too? If not, is it truly because of Brexit? (For the record, Brexit was a horrible stupid idea for a whole bunch of other reasons.)
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Not solely Brexit, though that was a massive factor.
Up until the 70’s, we were self-sufficient, only importing fancy, but not necessary, foodstuffs.
Today, the UK imports 40% of all it’s food.
Therese Coffey, fuckwit that she is, suggests we eat turnips instead of tomatoes, without the forethought to realise that the biggest turnip provider in the UK has his farm in her constituency and, moreover, will not be growing them this year due to increases in materials needed to grow them (I’m guessing manure and pesticide).
So yeah, it’s pretty bad everywhere, but the UK has managed to doublefuck itself.
(I think my facts are near-enough accurate and, besides, who puts fucking turnips on salad!)
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Is it worse than the food inflation in the US? Because I routinely go “Haha fuck you!” to some of the prices I see in the grocery store these days.
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I wish they’d stop feeding the turnip greens to livestock, they’re great with pasta, and saute’d and in soups. We grow enough food here to keep the farmers paid, and people fed, if we didn’t bin half of the stuff they put effort into producing (and the giant capitalist supermarket chains weren’t in the middle squeezing both sides).
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This is a huge part of what liveable cities will entail in a just green transition: we don’t have monopolies in food supply, we can’t afford the huge food waste this costs the world, the mountain of uneaten food where after decades of providing below cost food (living on government/EU subsidies to farmers) they have realised they have us by the vitals and can gouge as much as they like. And we still have to drive for the “big shop”, a huge amount of which we will throw out.
Britain, like Ireland, needs to look at feeding itself rather than exporting. Brexit and fishing delivered a grim reminder on what priorities were…
@geoduck no, it’s not just Brexit. Food is up hugely here, my food bill is up 40%ish. It is worse up north though which is part of the UK (and which could have remained that way while getting any potential benefit from Brexit while maintaining all the benefits of EU membership if the DUP weren’t idiotic bigots and the English Conservative Party bad crazy.)
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Fertiliser prices are high thanks to Russia, as are the energy prices that greenhouse and polytunnel growers rely on for heat to produce early salad crops grown in UK.
In Europe tomatoes etc are in reduced supply (also because of energy costs) – growers in Europe are selling to EU markets where the prices fluctuate rather than to UK supermarkets which stick to a price which is less mobile and European growers don’t need to accept those terms.
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And since Brexit, are not compelled to sell to the UK either.
Great info, @timd , thank you.
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Reports are that there are some shortages in France/Spain, but not as bad. Basically, if you are a Moroccan salad grower and get hit by weather do you ship to Europe (easy) or UK (extra cost, lots of nasty paperwork, etc)
I think her attempted point was “eat good traditional British winter veg and not poncey out-of-season salads, you proles”. After decades of the supermarkets ‘educating’ us that salad can be easily purchased at any time of year (at a higher profit level).
And whilst Minette Batters, head of the National Farming Union here would usually be ‘not one of us’ she keeps saying in public that the govt needs to take food security seriously and do something about it, and the govt, of course, ignores it because Tory fuckwits believe in ‘the market’ resolving all things.
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I get it, but then of course this:
So I guess we are Kernakerred either way.
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Your second point is really what the NFU is on about. The govt could take some measures to help guys like this get growing - turnips or otherwise - but don’t.
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You are spot on.
The UK gov is on target to spend tens of millions of pounds “rewilding”.
I have nothing against conservation, but nature has found a way to survive alongside farming for hundreds of years now.
But then, the UK being what it is, it would rather concentrate on unsustainable meat production for export than crops we could sustainably eat here.
I’m not an expert. I’m quite pissed-off, though.
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Anyone feel like a remake (yet again) of Robin Hood – the outlaws who hunted in the King’s Forest because otherwise they had too little food?
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That might be a nice addition to the post-coronation feast…
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