Why is good food so expensive?

Our local shopping centre has been running one of the "school holiday programs" designed to pull people in and get them to spend money.  They cost a lot to run of course but the centre management must think it is worthwhile and that all those running a business there will benefit...and therefore contribute to the cost.

There has been the usual "face painting", some messy sort of craft (definitely fun), balloons being tied into various shapes (and bursting of course) and a "tiny town" with big cardboard structures I would have loved playing with as a kitten. There was also a wheel of some sort where you could spin it and "win" a prize of some sort. 

The prizes seem to have been small packets of crisps or similar sorts of food. One of the local grandmothers spoke to me as I was passing and asked with a sigh, "Why is good food so expensive? They could have been handing out pieces of fruit but I suppose the cost was too much."

Yes, she was almost certainly correct. It was likely cheaper to hand a child a small packet of highly processed, salty something or other with little or no food value than offer them an apple grown in the hills behind us...and they are more likely to eat the contents of the packet.

It is of course the same story inside any supermarket. The white "own brand" bread kept fresh with a lot of preservatives is just over half the price of the "speciality" less processed loaves. Soft drinks are cheaper than milk. In the meat area the sausages (with goodness' knows what in them) are cheaper than a chop but all the meat is more expensive than buying a ready made "pizza". 

Right now, in the middle of our winter, the locally grown fruit is mostly apples, oranges and mandarins. They may be local but they are not cheap. We can still get bananas all year round and, now, it seems strawberries and even raspberries. The cost is enormous and the quality is not as good as the "in season" fruit. 

There was a glut of cauliflower recently. I heard people complaining. The problem seemed to be that many people had no idea what to do with "so much" cauliflower. Aubergine? Most people just continue on to the next vegetable? Leeks appear only in tinned soup with less than three stars on the label but it is much cheaper to buy than even just one leek. Peas and beans are in the freezer section with the mix filled out with lots of relatively cheap and filling sweetcorn.

As a person living alone I do not need five kilo bags of potatoes but I wonder why someone shopping for four teenage boys ignores those in favour of a kilo of frozen "chips". The cost for the former was just a little more but would have ended up less per meal. 

The man who runs our greengrocery was looking carefully at a box of something the other day. "It will have to do but let customers know that we aren't happy with it. It's just the best we can get."  

Opposite the greengrocery there is a "fish shop". It is such a far cry from the way my paternal grandfather bought the Friday fish that I barely recognise it. We might not have been Catholics but we ate fish on Fridays. Grandpa would buy it direct from whichever boat had brought in something they thought worthy of selling to a man who knew a good meal when he saw one.  The price of fish is far beyond the budget of most families.

I will go and buy milk today. The cost of milk has increased dramatically recently but the dairy farmer is getting less. I am aware of how hard they work even now that "it's all computerised" and the computer tells them just how much to feed the cow and how much milk the individual cow has produced. It is still cheaper to buy artificially flavoured carbonated water which is loaded with sugar that someone had to produce in a factory and involves even more production. Why is milk more expensive? 

I am grateful I can still afford to eat but it would be good to know that the good stuff is at least just as cheap as everything else.