Get used to paying more for your food and drink

The media loves a good food shortage story - especially shortages of things we love to eat and drink. Today there's news that wine prices may have to rise, after the poor weather in Europe. 

So when last week the National Pig Association (how brilliant we have a National Pig Association - I imagine them all sat around a boardroom table dressed up like something from Animal Farm in top hats and monocles) announced that a global bacon shortage "is now unavoidable", it spread on social networks and around news organisations like wildfire.

"Getting worked up about a few extra pence on a pack of bacon does seem to be the worst kind of petulant first-world problem"

Of course, it was all so much hogwash (sorry). There is, there will be, no shortage of pork. As this carefully-argued Slate piece points out, a slight global increase in the price of all meat is a delayed consequence of the increase in corn prices, which have been affected by climate change (or "bad weather" if you're a head-in-the-sand moron).

And anyway, because this is the UK and not Somalia and we're never actually going to completely run out of anything, just pay more for it, getting worked up about a few extra pence on a pack of bacon does seem to be the worst kind of petulant first-world problem.

People have been saying for a long time that we need to pay more for our food, to provide farmers with a decent living, to release the stranglehold of the supermarkets and to push up the quality of the things we eat generally. It should not, in 2012, be possible to buy an entire chicken for £2 - and yet there they are anyway on the supermarket shelves, flabby and hock-burned and weak-boned, pathetic victims of our desire to constantly push down prices. 

"What if we all paid what food and drink actually cost the planet to produce?"

A rise in the price of meat, and wine, and many other types of food and drink can only be a good thing - a drought on the continent, for example, will mean us all paying more for Spanish and Italian wines but look at the 'average retail price' mentioned in that article. Any bottle of wine even under £5 is mainly tax, so around the £4 mark you're getting 75cl of chemically-enhanced grape juice and not much else.

So, imagine this. What if we all paid what food and drink actually cost the planet to produce? We would eat better meat less often, better wine less often, and end up healthier ourselves and with a healthier world to leave to our grandchildren. That does seem to be, if you'll excuse the pun, a small price to pay.

Chris Pople is a food blogger who charts his food experiences online at his blog, Cheese and Biscuits. Follow Chris Pople on Twitter: @chrispople

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