Poverty impacts people’s ability to consume a nutritious diet. When you lack the resources to shop for and cook food with enough protein, energy, or micronutrients, your health and well-being is damaged. In the extreme, this deficit is classed as malnutrition.

Those experiencing malnutrition have worse health outcomes and take longer to recover from illnesses. In children, malnutrition affects growth and cognitive function, leading to slower development and poorer education performance. These are some of the hidden costs of our cheap and unhealthy food system; for every £1 spent on food in the supermarket, we are paying an extra 39 pence on the costs of diet-related disease.

While commonly thought to be a problem restricted to developing countries in the Global South, in the UK, cases of malnutrition have almost doubled in the decade since the Conservatives took office in 2010. Data compiled by the National Health Service (NHS) shows that in 2020–21, there were 10,109 diagnoses of malnutrition, up from 4,657 in 2010–11.