The night-walkers of Uganda

a) How much do these items cost in your local supermarket?
a loaf of bread
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a litre of milk
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a dozen eggs
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a packet of pasta
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b) Skim-read the article to find out (on average) how much the items currently cost in Britain.
Note: Tesco and Asda are two of the largest supermarket chains in the UK.
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Global food crisis 
Families struggling as bills begin to bite 
Esther Addley 
May 29, 2008 
Jim Wall works on oil rigs in the North Sea 
and is away for two weeks at a time. His wife, 
Sharon, stays at home with their four young 
children. Sharon cannot drive and there are no 
good quality food shops nearby, so feeding her 
children is complicated. 
On his way home from the oil rigs, Jim Wall stops 
at a large Tesco supermarket in Aberdeen to 
buy “a bit of everything”. The family has a box of 
vegetables delivered from a local farmers’ market 
every week, but they look forward to Jim coming 
home with the rest of the food. 
“I always fill up the fridge and freezers before I 
go, and then when I come back I have to do it all 
over again,” he says. “I know the cupboards will 
be almost empty by then.” The couple say their 
weekly food bill is usually around £150, however, 
in the last four days they’ve spent £220. A few 
years ago they spent about £100 a week on food. 
“Bread and milk are good examples,” says 
Jim Wall. “I think it was about 75p for a loaf of 
Asda bread two months ago, now it’s almost 
£1.” “I usually get a little bit of shopping when 
he’s away, but what used to cost me £20 to £25 
is now £35 to £40, for pretty much the same 
amount of stuff,” says Sharon Wall. “I was in 
Asda the other day and I thought, oh, I’ve got 
hardly anything here and it’s £20!”
Many families in Britain have the same problems 
as the Walls. For many people, food price 
increases are starting to hurt. 
Bread costs 20% more than it did a year ago 
and rice 60% more. Pasta has gone up by 81% 
in some shops, and in Tesco it was 113% more 
expensive. Butter costs 60% more than it did and 
meat prices are up too. These are the sharpest 
rises in food prices since records began.
“The odd thing is that a lot of people have only 
just noticed,” says Alex Beckett, a food journalist. 
“In fact, food prices have been going up for quite 
some time, but they have gone up dramatically in 
the last 18 months.” 
In his small local Asda, Jim Wall pauses in front 
of a shelf of bread. Warburton’s farmhouse 
loaves, the family’s favourite, are £1.12 each. He 
puts two loaves of Asda Baker’s Gold, 95p each, 
in his trolley. “When your family eats a loaf of 
bread a day, that 17p does make a difference.” 
Jim also has to decide which eggs to buy: “I 
really don’t like the way battery chickens are 
kept, but six eggs from battery chickens are just 
88p, and 12 free range cost £2.92.” In the end he 
buys a dozen ‘barn eggs’ for £2.52. 
Sharon Wall says that they think about food 
miles, pesticides and fair trade, but these days 
‘green’ shopping is an expensive luxury. “We 
try to buy organic food and I try to get fair trade 
coffee but sometimes I just can’t afford it.”
Supermarkets do have many promotions and 
special offers but as Jim says, “The things that 
aren’t good for you, the cookies and the cakes 
and the crisps, are the things that are on offer”. 
The Scottish parliament is looking at the problem 
of providing good healthy food to the people 
in Scotland. This is a topic that needs to be 
discussed not only in Scotland, say experts. 
Currently people in Britain throw away £10bn-
worth of food a year, including, every day, 
550,000 chickens and 5.1m potatoes.
© Guardian News & Media 2008
First published in The Guardian, 29/05/08