Food Reference Budgets as a Potential Policy Tool to Address Food Insecurity: Lessons Learned from a Pilot Study in 26 European Countries
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Blanquerna School of Health Sciences—Universitat Ramon Llull-Global Research on Wellbeing—GRoW Research group, Padilla, 08025 Barcelona, Spain
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Research Foundation—Flanders, Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy—University of Antwerp, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium
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Thomas More Kempen, 2440 Malle, Belgium
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Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy—University of Antwerp, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium
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Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6ED, UK
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019, 16(1), 32; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16010032
Received: 31 October 2018 / Revised: 8 December 2018 / Accepted: 14 December 2018 / Published: 24 December 2018
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Addressing Food and Nutrition Security in Developed Countries)
The aim of this article is to present the development of cross-country comparable food reference budgets in 26 European countries, and to discuss their usefulness as an addition to food-based dietary guidelines (FBDG) for tackling food insecurity in low-income groups. Reference budgets are illustrative priced baskets containing the minimum goods and services necessary for well-described types of families to have an adequate social participation. This study was conducted starting from national FBDG, which were translated into monthly food baskets. Next, these baskets were validated in terms of their acceptability and feasibility through focus group discussions, and finally they were priced. Along the paper, we show how that food reference budgets hold interesting contributions to the promotion of healthy eating and prevention of food insecurity in low-income contexts in at least four ways: (1) they show how a healthy diet can be achieved with limited economic resources, (2) they bring closer to the citizen a detailed example of how to put FBDG recommendations into practice, (3) they ensure that food security is achieved in an integral way, by comprising the biological but also psychological and social functions of food, and (4) providing routes for further (comparative) research into food insecurity.
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MDPI and ACS Style
Carrillo-Álvarez, E.; Penne, T.; Boeckx, H.; Storms, B.; Goedemé, T. Food Reference Budgets as a Potential Policy Tool to Address Food Insecurity: Lessons Learned from a Pilot Study in 26 European Countries. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 32.
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