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A thorough trawl in 2020 brought to light more than 40 different kinds of policies around the world designed to improve diets to deliver better nutrition and health. And yet, the vast majority of people do not eat within dietary guidelines. If anything, diets — and with them health — are getting worse in many places. What’s the problem? Maybe, it is that the people who devise the policies are too far away from the lives of the people they’re trying to help.
That’s the gist of a new paper from a group of researchers in the UK. They argue that “a fresh approach is needed, one that considers the full picture of people’s realities”. Corinna Hawkes, lead author on the paper, took me through some of those realities.
Notes
- The published paper is The full picture of people’s realities must be considered to deliver better diets for all.
- The earlier podcast, with Corinna Hawkes, Patrick Webb and Eileen Kennedy is We need to talk about diets.
- Here is the transcript, thanks to generous supporters.
For a long time people have suspected that there is a kind of logic to what people buy as they have a bit more to spend on food. First, they change from coarse grains — things like sorghum or millet — to fine grains, wheat and rice, maybe corn. Then they switch up to protein from animal-sourced foods. This logic was even considered something of a law, Bennett’s Law, after Merrill Bennett, the agricultural economist who formulated the idea in the early 1940s. But it wasn’t really a law, because no-one had actually studied income and food purchases under controlled conditions.
Let’s assume that people understand what they ought to eat to keep themselves healthy over the course of their lives and that the nutritious food to deliver good health is available in the market. More than one in three of the world’s people simply cannot afford a healthy diet. We know because the Food Prices for Nutrition team at Tufts University has developed tools that allow countries to use data that most of them are already collecting (to compile their Consumer Price Index) and from them calculate the cost of a healthy diet. The results have been alarming for some policy-makers, with encouraging results in at least one country.
The Spanish are the world’s greatest anchovy eaters. They get through about 2.69 kilograms each a year, more than a tin a week. So you might be forgiven for thinking that anchovies have always been a part of Spanish cuisine. Not so, with the exception of the good people of Malaga, who developed a thing for deep-fried fresh anchovies. The rest of Spain resolutely ignored anchovies as food, spreading them instead on their fields as fertiliser. All that started to change in the late 19th century, when Italians, expert in the ways of salting fish, fetched up on the Basque coast to buy up all the fish that nobody else wanted. Among them, Giovanni Vella, who invented the modern tin of anchovy fillets in olive oil.