The Real Value of Food

We know the price of food but do we know its value?

Food is a massive part of our life although its usually one of the most neglected parts of our life. We all love a good bargain especially myself but are cheaper items when it comes to food the same quality and actually cheaper?

Let's take chicken for example. A frozen bag of chicken from your local super market is about £4 per kilo where as I have a good relationship with my butcher and I get 1 kilo fresh chicken breast for £5. Which is obviously more expensive and can be more if you shop at super markets. Lets have a little look at the chicken. Surely chicken is chicken and only chicken, right? Wrong. Most value frozen chicken is only about 80% chicken, the rest is water, corn oil, stabilisers and salt. So technically your only getting 800g of chicken for your £4 plus a load of extra ingredients you probably wouldn't want to eat. I mean if I want water id by bottled not suck it out of a frozen chicken breast. So comparing my £5 per kilo chicken from my butchers and the 800g for £4 they are both technically the same price, £1 per 200g and the flavour is night and day.

One thing we teach in our nutritional workshops is to check the packaging and make sure that you are actually buying what you think you are buying. The UK is among many countries in the world that allow companies to use pictures of fruit on their products that contain very little or actually no fruit at all. We also allow products such as mints to claim that they are sugar free when actually they are almost 100% sugar. This is due to a little loophole where the serving is less than 0.5g which is almost all sugar but as its less than 0.5g per serving its technically sugar free. Although if you get through a pack in a day (especially if you are trying to give up something else like smoking) you are getting your full daily allowance of sugar without actually eating any real food.

Get in touch with local farms and suppliers, ask the provenance of your food, read the ingredients, check packets and always remember if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Special blog post editorial from one of our FitFarms Health and Fitness instructors.

Image Credit: MyFamilyTips.com