Tough economic times causing 'food stress'

Tough economic times are causing "food stress" in poor and middle-class households as they cut back spending on food to cope with costs such as rent or mortgage payments, researchers say.

"Households with low or moderate food security used food as a flexible part of their budget they could manipulate...depending on what was happening that week," Otago University nutritionist Claire Smith said today.

This was done so that families could pay for accommodation, power, petrol and insurance, she said.

"If we could ease the economic constraint of those expenses, it would probably have an flow-on effect in terms of how much people can spend on food."

But proposals for behavioural solutions, such as getting households to budget properly, buy less ready-to-eat food such as takeaways, spend more time cooking, or shop more usefully were largely ineffective, according to Ms Smith, a speaker at a three-day national conference being held in Dunedin from tomorrow by Dietitians New Zealand.

She said research in 2007 and 2008 showed 60 percent of the households she surveyed in Dunedin and Wellington were "food secure" but 10 percent had low food security and 30 percent had only moderate security.

"Nearly half of the low-income families - those with an income of less than $30,000 - were experiencing food insecurity," she told a Science Media Centre briefing for journalists before the conference.

Since the start of the Family, Food Environment study, economic recession had been accompanied by wider income cuts, redundancies, and increased food, electricity and fuel prices.

Earlier work had shown that a lack of food security was more commonly found in households in deprived areas, and those with children or those headed by younger adults, and in Maori or Pacific Island homes, single parent homes, or those reliant on welfare payments.

An adult woman in a "food-secure" household was spending an average of $55.64 a week on food.

The equivalent spending in a home with moderate food security was $49, and a woman with low food security spent $36.52, mainly by buying fewer snacks, cakes, and biscuits, less non-alcoholic drinks, and lower-quality bread.

"They weren't spending their money on empty calories," Ms Smith said. "They were maintaining their spending on foods such as milk."

She said secure and insecure households bought similar numbers of ready-to-eat meals, but the poorer families were opting for unhealthier takeaways such as fish and chips, rather than eating in restaurants.

An associate dean at Flinders University in Adelaide, Professor John Coveney - who will attend Dunedin conference - said the Otago research was important because it showed calls for poor people to simply eat less junk food was based on a myth.

"They're not spending more than other groups on 'empty calories': they've already cut back," said Prof Coveney.

People who were paying 30 percent or more of their income on rent or mortgages were regarded as suffering "housing stress".

"We're now starting to use this term 'food stress' where low income people, to eat healthily may have to spend 30 percent of their income on a healthy diet," he said.