Sheffield plan aims to make healthy food cheaper and more accessible

A meeting of the council’s strategy and resources policy committee (July 13) approved Fairer, Healthier, Greener, a new food strategy for Sheffield introduced by director of public health Greg Fell.

A report to the committee states: “The current food system in Sheffield (and across the UK) does not support human or planetary health and lacks resilience. If we are going to safeguard our food supply for the long term, we urgently need to change the way we grow, cook, eat and dispose of our food.”

The report adds that many people in Sheffield can’t afford a nutritious diet. It adds: “It drives health inequalities and is a social justice issue that affects the ability of communities to be healthy and happy.

“Healthier food is more expensive per calorie than less healthy food. It is not ignorance or the inability to cook that is the root cause of poor diet and the associated health conditions, it is poverty.”

More than one in five city children and overweight or obese when they start school and this increases to more than one in three by year six (children aged 10 to 11).

Processed food

It criticises processed food as harmful to health and the planet but “cheap, abundant, and heavily marketed”. It says this helps to drive health inequalities.

The aim of the council food strategy is to “address the affordability and availability of nutritious food, rather than concentrating on individual behaviour change”. It aims to tackle obesity in this way.

The strategy includes setting up community food growing initiatives and affordable food clubs, placing controls on new fast-food outlets openingnear to secondary schools, as previously reported, and making healthier food a requirement in council-run venues that serve food.

Another idea is to launch voluntary schemes with food businesses and wholesalers to explore ways to make healthier choices easier and more accessible to customers without impacting on their overall profitability. These could target outlets near secondary schools and in areas of economic deprivation.

The committee also approved spending £658,000 a year on weight management services.

Coun Angela Argenzio welcomed the report as a key step towards addressing food inequalities in the city.

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