The Food Foundation’s annual Broken Plate 2025 report has just landed. I haven’t included all the main points as the report does a great ‘at a glance’ section. Here are the main ones related to sustainability and health though;

• To afford the government-recommended healthy diet, the most deprived fifth of the population would need to spend 45% of their disposable income on food, rising to 70% for those households with children. The least deprived fifth of households only need to spend 11%.

• On average, healthier foods are more than twice as expensive per calorie as less healthy foods. While this pattern has persisted for at least the past decade, the gap has widened in the past two years with the price of more healthy foods rising by 21% between 2022 and 2024, while less healthy foods saw an increase of 11%.

• The Food Foundation analysis of plant-based milk alternative products found that on average they are 55% more expensive than fresh dairy milk (£1.92/litre versus £1.24/ litre). Soya remains the cheapest alternative milk but is still on average 26% more expensive than dairy milk.

• Overall, all plant-based alternatives are more environmentally sustainable than dairy milk. However, if not fortified, they lack key micronutrients found in dairy milk; in particular, cow’s milk is currently an important contributor to intakes of iodine and calcium in UK diets. Concerns have been raised about inconsistent levels of micronutrient fortification between individual products.

• On average, children consume less than half the recommended amount of fruit and veg but twice the recommended amount of sugar.

• While UK emissions for the whole economy fell by 38% between 2008 and 2022, emissions from the food system fell by just 17% over the same period of time.

• Children in the most deprived fifth of the population are nearly twice as likely to be living with obesity as those in the least deprived fifth by their first year of school. The number of diabetes-related lower-limb amputations (not just in children) increased by 68% since 2009.