At a public lecture to the Irish Food Safety and Technology Institute last week Dr Upton, a food scientist, drew on statistics that suggest as many as ten per cent of people in Ireland – that is 375,000 people – will die prematurely as a result of food poverty.
The term ‘food poverty' is defined as “the consumption of food whose nutritional content is too low to provide its consumers with their basic nutritional requirements so that their health, cultural an social participation is adversely affected”.
Amongst those identified as being particularly vulnerable risk are the elderly, who may relay on meals-on-wheels and who may not have access to shops that stock nutritionally sound foods; children of poor families (in a 1999 survey 7.7 percent of Irish mothers said their children had to go without three meals a day because of lack of money); the homeless; the disabled; farmers of non-viable farms; and the Traveller community.
There are around 24,000 Travellers in Ireland, and although little research has been carried out as to their actual food and nutritional intake, a small study of 421 people found that three quarters did not plan their meals on a weekly basis, and more than a third of participants said that lack of a fridge was a reason for this.
Moreover Dr Upton also counts the obese as being amongst the food poor. Although they can consume a lot of food, they can still be deprived of the essential nutrition they need to remain healthy, she said.
She is not the first to link obesity and poor nutrition: other experts have maintained that although we usually associate malnutrition with starvation, in fact it is a contributing factor to obesity.
A study released by the UN-backed Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in February 2004 concluded that preventing malnutrition and hunger in pregnant women and children could stop the onset of obesity in later life.
Obesity is estimated to cause around 2,000 premature deaths each year among an Irish population of around 4 million. About 18 per cent of adults are obese and 39 per cent are overweight.
Ireland has signed two pieces of international agreements pledging that it will take measures to ensure equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need, and acknowledging that access to nutritionally adequate and safe food is a right of each individual (the UN International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966, and the Food and Agriculture Organisation's 1992 World Declaration on Nutrition).
Dr Upton said that, in the light of this, “at its most basic, the experience of food poverty in Ireland is a breach of individuals' rights under international law”.
Although recognising that the Irish government does operate or fund a number of programmes that could combat food poverty, she said that these are “disparate”, and that “the absence of a strategy dedicated to eliminating food poverty specifically is, at least partially, responsible for the fact that as many as 375,000 in Ireland can be counted among the food poor”.
She looked to the “Food and Health Action Plan” introduced in Ireland's neighbour the UK which seeks to address the issue at several levels: food production, manufacture and preparation; promoting awareness of access to healthier food; and providing information to consumers about what constitutes healthy eating and nutrition.
“We need such a programme in Ireland,” she said.
Although a policy on nutrition is imminent, this is believed to concern only children at risk of obesity. “That's a start, but it's not good enough,” said Dr Upton. Rather, she is advocating a multi-sectoral policy on food and nutrition.
“I don't doubt that the solution to Food Poverty in Ireland is achievable. If politicians have the courage to admit we have a problem here which is just as shocking (not least because we are a very rich country) as it is elsewhere in the world we can eliminate Food Poverty.
