Food Inflation in the UK: Why is an incorrect figure being quoted?

I talked about the increase in the price of food a few weeks ago. I found that the price of food for the products I buy if I were to continue buying those precise same products had roughly increased by 15% from July 2021 to July 2022.  

I was astonished to read a few days ago this article claiming that food prices have only increased by 10.6% in the past year.  Astonished, since the price of food has only been accelerating in the 2 months since I wrote that other blog post in late July.  So it seemed to me that the price inflation of food would be even higher than it was in July i.e higher even than 15%. So I decided to check the prices out by comparing some of the food prices I bought back in September and October 2021 from Morrisons and Sainsburys, and comparing to what the current prices are now on the 30th September 2022.  In the below table I’ve mainly included the more common foods that many people frequently buy e.g. bread, potatoes, milk, cheese etc.

Obviously, a lot of food cycles up and down in price all the time, with the low end of the cycle being labelled "offers". I always use prices at the low end of the cycle.

Weight (kg) Product 2021 2022 % Increase 4 pints Fresh Milk £1.09 £1.55 42% 0.4 Cheddar Cheese £2.00 £2.75 38% 0.2 Pecans £2.50 £2.83 13% 0.2 Walnuts £2.00 £2.22 11% 0.4 Warbs Wholemeal Bread £0.85 £0.90 6% 0.2 Morrisons Plain Yogurt £0.50 £0.75 50% 0.15 Walkers Crisps 6x25g £1.25 £1.50 20% 0.4 Jacob's Cream Crackers 2x200g £1.60 £1.80 13% 0.095 Nescafé Gold Blend Espresso Instant Coffee £3.00 £3.50 17% 850ml Ribena Squash £1.50 £1.50 0% 1 Fresh Chicken Drumsticks £1.35 £2.25 67% 1.35 Fresh Whole Chicken £3.00 £3.50 17% 0.3 Morrisons 10 Haddock Fish Fingers £1.75 £1.99 14% 0.5 Morrisons Chunky Battered Haddock £2.99 £5.25 76% 0.4 Bassetts Jelly Babies Sweets Carton £2.00 £2.00 0% 0.2 Morrisons Fruit Jellies £0.90 £1.25 39% 2.5 King Edward Potatoes £1.50 £1.75 17% 2.5 Morrisons Baking Potatoes £1.25 £1.85 48% All Products £31.03 £39.14 26%
There are 18 food products, and as an average they've increased by 26% (highlighted in yellow). Out of the 18 food products listed, only 3 of them have increased by less than 10.6%. It seems to me to be unrealistic to see how that figure could be dragged down to 10.6% by considering more foods. So how on earth is this 10.6% figure being derived? Incidentally, note how much cheaper the haddock fish fingers are to the chunky battered haddock.  And yet they have a very similar percentage of haddock fillet per unit weight (64% and 65% respectively). Fish fingers are significantly the cheapest way to eat fish, more so if one just buys pollock fish fingers (they don't label them as pollock, of course, since they want customers to assume they're cod.  They use names like omega 3 fish fillet etc, even though the omega 3 content is only a small fraction of fish like mackerel and salmon). Original screenshot of spreadsheet below (I couldn't put it in the middle without messing up all the formatting).

What can we do about being stuck in a miserable and futile existence?

 

The following article, I’m stuck in a miserable and futile existence, quotes someone who laments:

I see a therapist once a week. But I have a shameful and persistent feeling of despair. I’m stuck in a miserable and futile existence. I don’t like work. I hate being trapped within someone else’s schedule, sending pointless emails, attending pointless meetings. I hate the nine-to-five, the long commute, asking permission to take leave – it’s just sleep, work, sleep, work.


I have no garden, and noisy neighbours. I won’t starve or lose the roof over my head but I can neither afford to go away on holiday nor to dine out or buy clothes and books.


My family and friends are wonderful. I have a partner who loves me. But I am just desperately unhappy. How can I say any of this out loud to the people close to me? I feel like a petulant child: stuck, wailing. I don’t know how to be alive in this world and be happy. 

The rise of modern capitalism and the introduction of the division of labour to maximise profits has resulted in most people living their lives as wage slaves, obliged to do work that is dull and repetitious. For many people, this is partially offset by the meeting up with people in the workplace, making friends, having a laugh with them. But for others who are not so gregarious, and maybe find it awkward to get on with others, going to work is often then just a daily grind that is unfulfilling and simply lacks any personal meaning. It is surely not how we are meant to live. Many of us are simply existing, not living.

It is true that we can get temporary distractions from the “toys” we can buy; the latest smartphone, or TV, or whatever. Or going on holiday. But even here, we are constantly comparing ourselves to others, feeling a failure as many others seem to be able to afford more than we can, or go on holiday more frequently. They can afford the latest and most expensive smartphone, and we can’t. But even when we do have enough money to buy all the latest gadgets’, this most often only temporarily ameliorates any feelings of emptiness, loneliness, and despair.



Nor, for many of us, is it helpful if we didn’t work at all. Many people find it profoundly boring not being in a full-time job as an employee. That they have nothing to do all day. Indeed, many people claim that when they were unemployed they were sleeping 12 hours a day and were just depressed.



I suggest that, ideally, we need to have a job, find work, which engages our interest. One needs to be intimately and emotionally involved in the product we're creating or the service we're providing. To produce something, or provide some service, that other people really appreciate together with the knowledge that not many others have the requisite skills to do likewise. It's working towards some goal, and for others to exclaim "wow" when they see what you've done. It's pride in producing something, or providing some service. And this in turn will encourage a sense of purpose and enjoyment in the work.



That’s the ideal, but in reality not the sort of work that most of us will ever obtain since modern industrial capitalist society creates precisely the type of work that is dull and repetitious. This is compounded by the fact that most of us work for 40 or more hours a week, hence leaving us less time for more purposeful activity. Incidentally, this is particularly vexing since it is my suspicion, and indeed some evidence suggests, that we could be just as productive, if not more so, if we worked fewer hours.



It seems to me that for a meaningful, fulfilling life, what we really need, what we really yearn, is a feeling of being alive. A feeling of life being an adventure. That life is a journey with ongoing meaningful experiences. But our modern industrial capitalist world forces us into meaningless soulless work and also conveys the message that we are just mere meat robots with no free-will destined to cease to exist when we die. All of which is antithetical to our yearning souls.



To be honest, I suspect we were all much happier in the Stone Age. Life won’t have been insipid, bland and boring back then. Yes, it might have been a hard life. A life full of many close brushes with death. But the comradeship and camaraderie when others save your life, and you theirs and the collective outpouring of emotions with the bitter and sweet taste of life in the raw, more than compensates. As would the implicit feeling that death is just another journey and all will come right in the end.



But I am not here to exclusively rail against all the failings of our modern world (I’ve done that elsewhere). To coin a phrase, it is what it is. The question is, for those who live bleak unfulfilling lives, what can we do about it?

If we cannot find work that is fulfilling, perhaps we can at least find work that has shorter hours, or where we interact with those with a similar mind-set to our own.



But I think the best course of action is to develop goals that we can strive towards. Develop an interest on some topic and read extensively about it. Or learn some new skill. It’s the striving towards a goal of some nature, even if it’s only a short term goal, which creates meaning and direction in our lives. But not unrealistic goals, rather something that you feel you can genuinely attain with some dedication and effort.

More on the Truss Government.

Following on from my last post.  As I mentioned there, I've made numerous Facebook posts in the past 2 months voicing my fears should Truss become PM. Any other Tory leader candidate would have been infinitely better. Why the hell did Tory party members vote for her? We could have had Rishi Sunak for God's sake! Yeah, he’s fairly clueless in certain respects, e.g. understanding the plight of the poor. But at least he's competent, level-headed and knows what he's doing. So at least the economy would have been in capable hands.



What the hell were Tory party members thinking of? I was watching Tory party members being interviewed before she became PM. They all seemed to prefer her to Sunak. I was just groaning, thinking, 'Oh my Gawd, she's going to become PM, and we're all screwed!' But I was screaming in the wilderness, a forlorn Cassandra figure.

Catastrophic times ahead for the UK

This "mini" budget is extraordinarily bad on all levels.

1. It seems likely to screw up the economy.

2. They're providing help to the richest, and scarcely any help for the poorest, but the latter are precisely the one's that won't be able to make ends meet with this cost of living crisis.

3. They don't appear to care about climate change and renewable energy. 

4. Truss is being belligerent to Russia, making it more likely that we in the UK will be the first target to be nuked.

Well done Tory party members for voting for this incompetent crazy silly women to be our PM...

I've been dreading the possibility of Liz Truss becoming PM ever since Boris Johnson resigned. And it started from April.

For just some facebook posts where I mention her, go here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

As I said on the 22nd July:

Liz Truss keeps asserting that putting up taxes will be deleterious for economic growth (OK, she doesn't use the word deleterious, she's probably never heard of it). Presumably the idea is that people will work less hard the more they're taxed. But where is she getting this idea from? Where is the evidence for this? Or is she just pulling this from her ass? I suspect the latter.

A quick google to try and verify her unsubstantiated assertion. This is the very first link, I wasn't deliberately sifting through trying to find evidence that contradicts her. The link says:

economic growth is largely unaffected by how much tax the wealthy pay. Growth is more likely to spur if lower income earners get a tax cut.

But the more wealthy one is, the more benefits one receives from tax cuts. Even in the best of times, this is the precise converse of what we should be trying to achieve, given the already disgraceful inequality. But Governments (or at least Tory ones) are hell-bent in making this even worse!


And it's especially pernicious given the cost of living crisis. God knows what's going to happen to the bottom 20% of people of the income or wealth scale this coming winter. It's especially bad given that Truss is going to become PM.
Why is the UK obligated to have complete incompetents as PMs??

And on the 9th August

Liz Truss’s emergency tax and spending pledges could cost upwards of £50bn a year, with experts warning they will fail to help the worst-off deal with the rising cost of living.

And even leaving the worst off aside, cancelling the national insurance rise helps those on a higher income vastly more than those on the lowest incomes that still pay national insurance. I think it's something like 7 times as much money.


Let's say there's a certain sum of money to help people, say £30 billion. So, as it stands, the worst off will receive no help. And the poorest that nevertheless pay national insurance might only get something like 5 billion, of that 30 billion. Those with greater incomes get the rest. How utterly insane and stupid can she be??


I keep saying that the help needs to be largely targetted to those who are the poorest, and this money needs to come from the wealthiest. She's proposing the precise opposite. It will be disastrous if she's being serious.


And, from what I read, it is generally believed that such tax cuts will fail to facilitate economic growth.

And on the 23rd August

Well, it's certainly going to be dire with Liz Truss as PM. I really am stumped in envisaging what will happen. She's only interested in helping the wealthy, and if she doesn't provide very substantial help for the poor, I'm afraid that could be very dangerous indeed.

26/9/22 Edited to add:   3 days later after the weekend. The pound is plummeting, reaching almost parity with the dollar.  Why on earth was this not anticipated?? 

18/10/22 A further edit:  Well, this mini budget has proved to be an unmitigated disaster.  The chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has been sacked, and a new chancellor Jeremy Hunt has been appointed in his place.  The new chancellor has U-turned on almost all the policies in the mini-budget, and it is anticipated that Liz Truss will soon be ousted as PM.

Why on earth was she ever appointed as PM in the first place?  I said back on the 6th of August that she might well be the shortest serving PM ever.