A grocery store that always costs you more
For more than 70 years, the organization, previously known as the Montreal Diet Dispensary, has calculated the price of a basic nutritious grocery store, made up of a predetermined list of foods deemed healthy and economical. “By “healthy diet”, we are talking about a diet that meets all basic needs, both in macronutrients and micronutrients,” explains Suzanne Lepage, nutritionist at the Alima center.
The resulting tool, the Nutritious and Economical Shopping Basket (PPNE), includes the cost of its various components. It therefore makes it possible to monitor changes in food prices.
It is essential to the work of the staff at the Alima center, who mainly help young families. “For nutritionists, the PPNE is something which, on a day-to-day basis, supports what we feel on the ground. Like the fact that clients tell me that it costs more and more, that they have more and more difficulty eating,” explains the dietitian.
Mme Lepage works with low-income families in Montreal, many of whom come from cultural communities. Among other things, she tries to adapt to their reality by offering them economical alternatives for their traditional recipes, but also by introducing them to recipes using foods more common in Quebec.
The nutritionist also emphasizes that the foods making up the PPNE are carefully chosen to be within the reach of its clientele: they are the most affordable products among those capable of meeting the nutritional needs of the families who attend the center. This formula has also encouraged several other organizations to create similar tools, such as Health Canada with its Nutritious Food Basket, for example. The latter is also used in the calculation of the consumption basket measurement.
Constantly rising prices
By comparing the prices listed in the PPNE of January 2022 with those of its latest edition, published in November and detailing the prices of October 2023, The duty noted an increase of more than 50% in the cost of several foods, including refined grain products (76.3%), starchy foods (55.6%) and frozen or canned vegetables (54.2%).
The average price of bread thus increased from approximately $5.82 per kilogram in January 2022 to $10.26 in October 2023. During the same period, more than half of the PPNE food categories increased by more than 10%.
Also during this period, certain products also saw their cost jump, then fall again. The price of pulses thus increased by almost 29.6% between January 2022 and July 2023, before recording a drop in October 2023.
“It was the first time that we saw an increase for legumes,” a food category with a historically low and stable price, explains Suzanne Lepage. “It is still worrying that [le coût d’aliments] commodities, such as grain products or legumes, which have not increased over the last 10 or 15 years, suddenly start to increase. »
These price increases are plunging more and more households into food insecurity: people can no longer afford to buy the products they want without making more economical choices (moderate insecurity) or altogether reducing their number of meal per day (serious insecurity).
Mme Lepage claims to see more and more similar cases at the doors of the Alima center. The data proves him right: the report Hunger report 2023 of Quebec Food Banks reports that the average monthly number of food bags provided to their users has almost doubled since 2019.
A price per day that is not unanimous
In addition to its review of food prices, the PPNE also provides an estimate of the minimum price of a healthy diet. In October 2021, this stood at $7.73 per person per day for a family of four. In October 2023, it was $9.65, an increase of about 25%. According to these same figures, it now costs about $1,158 per month to feed an average family, compared to $927.60 two years ago.
However, these data must be nuanced, says Jean-Philippe Laperrière, director of the Saint-Léonard Food Security Concertation and lecturer at the University of Quebec in Montreal. “ [Le PPNE] is a tool that is very interesting, because it allows us to know what the minimum is, he explains in an interview with Le Devoir. But the strange thing is that everyone uses this tool without putting it in context. »
Mr. Laperrière is the author, with his colleague Mylène Thériault, of an article published at the beginning of the year in the scientific journal Organizations & Territories entitled “Emergence of a new indicator for a decent food budget for Quebec households”. They define the “decent food budget”, a measure which aims to determine what amount of money “will allow households to meet their basic needs, but also other equally important imperatives, such as their socio-cultural needs”.
The households studied by the two researchers spent approximately double what was indicated by the PPNE. Based on the most recent figures, that would mean it would take about $2,316 a month to feed a family of four.
The two experts also deplore the fact that a measurement of the minimum nutritional requirement has become the norm when the time comes to calculate the contribution of food to our budgets, due to a lack of other tools at our disposal. “Food is always seen as something that we include in our budget – or in our daily life – at the last moment,” laments Jean-Philippe Laperrière.
“The fact of always putting [l’alimentation] in the background like that, to talk about the minimum… At a given moment, we have to remember that it is a vital function, to feed ourselves,” recalls Mylène Thériault, who is also a project manager at the Food Security Concertation of Saint -Leonard.
The various consumer basket indices also obscure an important reality of food: the social function of a shared meal. “It’s something that people should have the right to allow themselves to do, once in a while, to celebrate an event with their family, whether at a restaurant or at home,” says Mylène Thériault. It’s something so unifying, very socially important. »
“The consumer is still swallowed up by the current food system. Maybe he could make different choices or have different priorities, but he would still have to have the means,” recognizes Jean-Philippe Laperrière.