More ready meals than haute cuisine
France may have none of the hunger found in developing countries, the kind that distends children’s bellies and attracts western television crews. Here, it’s different, diffuse, discreet, and it operates ‘surreptitiously, almost without visible sign’, as Josué de Castro, the 20th-century Brazilian doctor and author of The Geopolitics of Hunger, put it. But it is visible: in food aid queues and welfare programmes in schools, when a manufacturer gives out free samples, or even in how a security guard checks customers’ bags as they leave the supermarket.
According to a recent Senate report, food insecurity affects eight million people in France; one in five according to the Ipsos-Secours Populaire survey. Food is often the first item on the household budget to come under pressure: 19% of French households struggle to pay for their children’s school lunches; 27% can rarely afford fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and fish; and many regularly skip meals. In a 2014 Médecins du Monde survey, two thirds of French people said they spent less than €3.50 a day on food (€2 in the case of the homeless, and people in squats or makeshift accommodation). Tight budgets force tough trade-offs, leading to nutritional deficiencies, a growing toll of obesity and chronic diseases, and anxiety about the future. Five and a half million people in France now rely on food aid, and that figure more than doubled between 2009 and 2017.
In 2013 Findus, ever keen to drive down supplier prices, discovered horse meat in its ‘pure beef' lasagne. The problem was Europe-wide: four and a half million meals on the market and the entire supply chain was implicated
Food is recognised as a fundamental right in international treaties, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (which came into force in 1976) and the Rome Declaration on World Food Security (1996). But unlike (...)
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