Food security and the externalities of food consumption

Based on the 1996 World Food Summit, food security is defined when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.

At a global level, the focus is often on the physical and economic availability of food. Ensuring a country’s population has sufficient calories available for consumption is a key priority for many governments across the world.

In the Western world, including here in the UK, the issue is different. Lack of sufficient calories is relatively rare, and the focus has become much more on the nutritional aspects of food and their ability to satisfy consumer preferences and to provide for an active and healthy life.

Consumer preferences are leading to adverse health outcomes. Affluent nutrition, the overconsumption of calories, has led to a global obesity epidemic that no country has yet successfully reversed.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) factsheet states that:

• In 2022, 1 in 8 people in the world were living with obesity. 
• Worldwide adult obesity has more than doubled since 1990, and adolescent obesity has quadrupled.
• In 2022, 2.5 billion adults (18 years and older) were overweight. Of these, 890 million were living with obesity.
• In 2022, 43% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight and 16% were living with obesity.
• In 2022, 37 million children under the age of 5 were overweight.
• Over 390 million children and adolescents aged 5–19 years were overweight in 2022, including 160 million who were living with obesity.

Economists would view this situation as an example of market failure, or externalities in consumption. Consumers are not making fully informed decisions about their diet and failing to consider the adverse consequences of overconsumption, or consumption of foods that could be harmful to their long-term health. Also, the cost to society of these adverse consequences such as the cost of treating dietary related illnesses are not adequately reflected in the price of those products.

This is also reflected in the fact that calorie for calorie, foods high in fat, sugar and salt are often cheaper than fresh fruit and vegetable, fresh meat and proteins and high fibre cereals products.

Ultra processed foods, often high in fat, sugar, and salt and low in micronutrients also fill a need in our time poor economies and appear to be exacerbating the situation. A recent article in the British Medical Journal, reviewing literature examining the link between consumption of UPF and adverse health outcomes concluded that:

‘Greater exposure to ultra-processed food was associated with a higher risk of adverse health outcomes, especially cardiometabolic, common mental disorder, and mortality outcomes. These findings provide a rationale to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of using population based and public health measures to target and reduce dietary exposure to ultra-processed foods for improved human health. They also inform and provide support for urgent mechanistic research.’

In the UK following years of austerity, a pandemic and a recession deeper than that seen for a generation, it is little wonder that consumers are very price conscious, looking for affordable ways to feed themselves and their families, which may provide a clue as to why the obesity crisis is deepening, despite the weight of evidence identifying underlying causes. It highlights the complexity of the issue. Consumers are eating food that satisfies appetite at a price they can afford and in a format that is acceptable to them. Even if they are well informed regarding the health implications of such a diet, the economic reality is that for many, income constraints prevent them from choosing nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life, the definition of food security.

In this series of articles, we will be examining food security in the UK, looking at the cost both to individuals and to society of the burden of obesity and associated poor health, and examining potential policy interventions.