How has the cost-of-living crisis impacted the transition to healthy diets from sustainable food systems?

The need for a transition towards healthy diets from sustainable food systems links into a multitude of accelerating social and environmental grand challenges including climate emergency, biodiversity loss and obesity. Governance for sustainable food systems is dominated by market-based approaches focusing on incremental change and centred on the idea of nudges, i.e., behaviour change interventions to promote pro-environmental minority behaviours. Yet, product price is often the primary driver for consumers, especially considering a highly volatile market environment, with a succession of major disruptions that have put additional strains on global food systems and have triggered Cost-Of-Living (COL) crises in many economies. This raises the question whether relative price increases have incentivized sustainable food consumption, or whether they have effectively served as a barrier for the transition to sustainability. Hence, we track prices of food products included in the UK consumer price inflation basket over a nine-year period. We develop two indices: the Environmental Impact Price Index and the Nutrition Impact Price Index to monitor the affordability of a healthy and sustainable diet. The indices provide a means of assessing the impact of changing prices on the nutritional value and sustainability of different food products. We select the food products found in the standard UK Consumer Price Index basket used to calculate inflation. We find the COL crisis period (2021–23) to have nudged UK consumers towards healthy and sustainable diets, but this is embedded in a long-term trend that has disincentivized healthy and sustainable food consumption.