https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...0-day-5wrsvtrxb

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...demic-vj8rx3fg5

Governments have allowed, and somewhat encouraged, the corporate food industries to take over people's lives. People no longer prepare and cook food at home. A lot of the food eaten at home is either bought at fast food establishments or purchased ready to eat after heating.
In the US, school lunches are just a mass of carbs with little nutrition so children get calories and stay hungry.

From the first article:



And from the 2nd article:




My take on much of this is that they're blaming poor people for being poor enough to need to stretch their food budget with BOGO deals.

When I worked in a grocery store, I saw every day what poor people buy to eat - they get in on the BOGO deals as much as possible for non-perishables (because they're much easier to store than perishables), and when they still reach the limit of what they can afford, they start taking meat off their order, because the 2-for-$1 deal on packets of seasoned pasta or rice will cover at least 2 meals, whereas $4 would only provide enough meat for 1 meal. (And they had usually picked up the family sized package of meat to get the better price per pound, so the package of meat was at least $8-$10, which threw them waaaay off budget)

But the point is that the super cheap pasta/rice/potato side dish was so much less expensive that they'd make do with that for some meals, and fill out a skimpy meal with other cheap junk food. Vegetables are also relatively expensive by comparison to pasta, rice, and potatoes, especially fresh vegetables, with frozen vegetables sometimes far more expensive, sometimes a little less expensive per pound than fresh. But fresh vegetables have a very short shelf life, so they didn't buy many of those because they wouldn't keep. Cooking and refrigerator/freezer facilities and cooking utensils also influence their ability to do much with any vegetables at all.

Or meat in general for that matter - but the poor tend to think of buying and cooking meat as more of a luxury than simply going to McD's and getting a burger from the dollar menu. Even if the fast food burger has less meat per dollar than the fresh homemade burger would, they're getting a larger overall volume of food (burger, bun, toppings) than if they cooked burgers and had to buy a package of buns, and all those toppings too.

But back to those articles, they're not defining "healthy living" or "healthy food", but by saying that farmers should be subsidized to grow vegetables (because they're less expensive) and "healthy food" instead of what they're currently growing - Well, they're still not defining healthy food, but certainly implying that produce is the primary healthy food. And sorry, but it's not less expensive than most junky convenience foods.

On the topic of wanting farmers to grow more vegetables, when we visited our daughter who lives in Norwich, England, in 2019, we took the train between London and Norwich, and a few days later from Norwich to Manchester, then on to Liverpool, then back to Norwich and finally back to London. We traveled past a lot of farms on those trains. I recall seeing a couple of chicken farms, and one hog farm (I'm vaguely remembering seeing cattle too), but far more farms that grew vegetables. I don't recall seeing any grain farms at all. That doesn't mean that grain farms don't exist in England, only that I didn't happen to see any grain farms from the train, but saw many growing vegetables, while only seeing a couple of livestock operations.

So if what they're suggesting is that farmers convert from livestock farming to vegetable farming - because it's healthier food than whatever else is being raised - sorry, but it really doesn't appear that most farmers there are growing anything other than "healthy" food, which seems to mean only vegetables. There's a relatively short growing season in England - spring weather starts much later and fall weather begins much earlier than than it does in much of the US, so there's going to be a lot of vegetables that they just can't grow - unless they're short season varieties. (Keep in mind that livestock can be raised year-round, and that there's a lot of land which is quite suitable for raising livestock, but will be extremely difficult to grow any plants - particularly rocky farmland suitable for pastures, or soil that has a high clay content)

As far as converting farmland from livestock to crops of any kind... let's see, first the farmer will need to sell off all their livestock, and remove all of the livestock shelters. Next they need to invest hundreds of thousands on equipment to plow, disc, harrow, till, plant, treat, and harvest the crops (not sure what they're supposed to do with all the equipment they had to raise livestock - apparently throw that out just like they're apparently supposed to do with the livestock shelters). Don't forget to have the soil analyzed to determine if you need to let areas of the farm rest for a few years due to too much "natural fertilizer" build-up in certain areas, or if you need to spend a few years building up the nutrients in the soil in some areas to properly grow a crop. Then choose varieties of crops that will grow quickly enough to mature in England's short summers, get those planted, hope it rains enough for them to grow (but not so much that it causes the seed to rot in the ground) and that a wind storm, blight, insects, crop disease, or other natural disaster doesn't destroy the crop. Then get everything harvested as soon as it's ripe, before it goes to seed... Wait - Do they have enough experienced farm harvest workers to do all that in a timely manner?

They make it sound like all it requires to grow more veggies and make them cheap is to just throw a little money at the farmers - it's going to take a lot more than just a[I] little money, and boom, everyone will lose weight.

They might also want to take a look at improving the cheap, processed carb-slop they serve to patients in hospitals disguised as "food"

That's the key. It's CHEAP.

While more and more science shows a radical difference in nutrients between animal based and plant-based. Those simple tests of old found nutrients, but now we know if they aren't bioavailable, they might as well not be food.

It's cheaper and easier to grow GMO plants they can then drench with Round-Up. And they do.