One of those gaspingly untrue statements

There are indeed problems in this imperfect world, this vale of tears. The price of food in rich countries not really being one of them.

Nor is there anything new about people treating the obesity epidemic as if it is a simple matter of individual willpower rather than complex systemic change. In the rich world, obesity is an economic issue: the less money you have, the less access to healthy food you often have.

As long as we leave aside the spurious claims made by the organic and biodynamic movements (burying dung in a cow’s horn by the full moonlight to improve the quality of the fruit is a religious observance, not a scientific one) this simply is not true.

As ONS points out the average household food bill is around 10% of weekly income. Yes, this varies with household income but it is not true, simply is not, that healthy food is priced out of the range of the poorer while unhealthy food is not. Not unless we’re to take the excessively elitist view that by definition what the upper middle class eat is healthy, the diets of the proletarians are unhealthy.

It may well be true that there is an income gradient to health. Even that diet will have something to do with this. But this is what George Orwell was talking about. It is not the price of food - which is the lowest it ever has been in the entire history of our species - which explains the variance in the healthfuness of diets between the richer and poorer among us.

That is, it may well be a a complex systemic problem but it’s not an economic one.