Name the costs of cheap food that the price does not carry.
Food is cheaper, as a share of income, than at almost any point in history. What does that price not include?
Yes.The same structure as any external cost: real, measurable, and borne by people who were not party to the sale. It is not an accusation, it is an accounting boundary.
Not quite.The price covers everything somebody had to buy. That is a narrower set than everything the production used.
Not quite.Subsidies are inside the public accounts and visible. The costs here are the ones nobody is invoiced for.
Cheap food is cheap at the till. Whether it is cheap depends on who is paying the rest of the bill, and when.
Which of these costs appear in the shelf price?
The farmer's diesel.
The packaging.
Cleaning nitrogen out of a river.
Soil that will take a century to rebuild.
The shop's electricity.
Yes.The line is not about importance. It is about whether somebody had to write a cheque before the food could be sold — which is the only kind of cost a price can carry.
Slide to move an outside cost into the price and see what happens.
NoneHalfAll
Paid at the till£10 per unit · 71%
Paid by others£4 per unit · 29%
NoneThe cheapest food, and the damage still occurs. Somebody is paying, later and elsewhere.
Paid at the till£12 per unit · 86%
Paid by others£2 per unit · 14%
HalfFood is dearer. Some of the most damaging production stops being worth doing.
Paid at the till£14 per unit
Paid by others£0 per unit
AllThe price is honest — and food is a bigger share of income, which lands hardest on those with least.
The last frame is the honest price. Why is it not obviously the right answer?
Yes.It is a genuine conflict between two good aims, not a puzzle with a hidden solution. Every serious proposal in this area is about who is compensated, not about whether the cost is real.
Not quite.They are measurable, and the argument is about who bears them.
Not quite.Some production would stop, which is what pricing a cost does. The sharper objection is the one about households.
Move the control to see what changes.
A household spends 12% of its income on food; another spends 30%. Food prices rise 10%. How many percentage points of income does the second household lose, compared with the first?
points
Yes.3% against 1.2%. The same price rise takes two and a half times as much from the household with less — the same weighted-basket arithmetic that made inflation personal in the money course.
Put in order what you now know about a price on a shelf.
Tap them in order — first to last.
Mostly not the food→A year-old bet→The clock set the power→The rest is unbilled
What is behind a shelf price.Yes.Four facts, all invisible at the till. Together they explain most of what looks strange about food news — from a farmer protesting at a record harvest to a gas crisis becoming a bread story.
What is the fair summary of the modern food system?
Yes.Both halves are true and neither cancels the other. Dismissing the achievement ignores what fewer famines and cheaper calories have meant; ignoring the unbilled costs assumes they will not arrive.
Not quite.It feeds eight billion people at a smaller share of income than any previous generation paid.
Not quite.Efficiency is measured against the costs included. Several large ones are not.
Lesson complete
A price can only carry the costs somebody had to pay before the sale.