Healthy eating: A question of money

Good food depends on your wallet, poorer people suffer because of it. Parts of the SPD have recognized the problem. But little changes.

Healthy food: not affordable for everyone Photo: Zoonar/imago

BERLIN taz | One would like to know what Hubertus Heil thinks about it. In a legal report commissioned by the Left in the Bundestag, lawyers accuse the state of nothing less than a human rights violation. Several studies have recently calculated that the amount of money included in citizens’ allowance for food is too low to provide a healthy diet. The Hamburg law firm Günther, which was commissioned by the Left, considers this to be contrary to international law.

Their argument: According to the UN social pact, Germany must guarantee its citizens that their food purchasing budget is not only enough to fill them up, but also for nutrient-rich products, lots of fruit and vegetables. Citizens’ money does not provide this and therefore violates the human right to adequate food. But apparently that is not an issue for the Federal Minister of Social Affairs.

“The BMAS rejects this argument and the conclusions,” said a Heils spokeswoman in response to a taz query. The citizen’s money is paid out as a total flat rate, so it is already “inadmissible” to calculate how much is available for buying food. How people divide the money is up to them. If there is no defined amount for food, no one can say whether it is enough or not.

A year ago it was not the Minister of Social Affairs, but the Green Federal Minister of Food Cem Özdemir who was the first member of a federal government to recognize food poverty as a problem. Does Heil, who is also deputy leader of the federal SPD, share that? His spokeswoman does not address this question. As early as 2020, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Ministry of Nutrition, which was then still run by the CDU, criticized that Hartz IV promoted malnutrition and thus irreversibly endangered the healthy development of children.

Higher social benefits, at the same time increased prices

Since then, social benefits have risen, but food prices have increased even more. In her response to a Green MP’s question about this, Heil’s Parliamentary State Secretary Kerstin Griese (SPD) replied in 2021: They don’t even calculate how much a health-promoting diet costs – so you can’t take a health-promoting diet into account as a goal in the standard rate.

This cool attitude has a tradition: food poverty is a blind spot for the SPD, especially when it comes to money. Even Franz Müntefering, who in his SPD career included party and parliamentary group leader, disturbed people in a meeting in 2006 with a quote from the Social Democrat August Bebel: “Only those who work should also eat.” At that time, Müntefering was Federal Minister of Social Affairs.

Under Heil’s leadership, the ministry brushes off criticism, mostly by pointing out that it is impossible to calculate how much money is intended for food from social benefits. The experts on the Left vehemently contradict this. Initially, an amount for food was included in the standard rate, determined based on the real expenditure of low-income households in 2018.

Since then, Hartz IV and citizens’ benefits have been increased several times without statistically re-assessing food expenditure. However, if the original amount was extrapolated in proportion to the total increases, an adult would have had around 5.73 euros per day for food and drinks in 2023; since January 2024 it has been around 6.42 euros – not enough for a healthy diet .

The lawyers already consider the methodology to be contrary to human rights: it is based on the actual consumer spending of low-income groups, but does not care about how much money is actually needed for a healthy life. They argue that if people receiving citizen’s benefit were to spend more than 5.73 euros a day on food, other areas relevant to fundamental rights would be lacking.

Ministry: Cost estimation “not feasible”

But it is by no means the case that the SPD is ignoring the issue. At the end of 2020, during the time of the grand coalition, the Bundestag parliamentary group decided on a position paper “Combating food poverty in Germany”. It contains almost every conceivable demand, from reducing sugar to healthy school meals. But it leaves out one thought: that the poorer part of society may lack the money to be able to afford healthy food.

In order to take the real need for social benefits into account, experts would have to create a “shopping basket” based on a “nutrition plan” and determine its costs, explains spokeswoman Heils. Because this requires a “variety of normative provisions,” the ministry believes it is “unfeasible.” The logic behind it: If the standard rate is just a “statistical quantity” that has “no connection to individual goods and services,” then you don’t have to worry about what kind of food the money is ultimately enough for.

For the traffic light coalition’s planned nutrition strategy, Cem Özdemir has promised to make social aspects a core issue. But apparently he won’t get much more than an appeal for better data collection on food poverty. This is due to the FDP, which would have been the first to save on citizens’ money after the Federal Constitutional Court’s budget ruling. But it is also due to the SPD, where no one has yet brought the issue of food poverty together with the question of money.

Maybe that’s slowly changing. Whether social benefits should be enough for a healthy diet? “Yes, of course I see it that way,” says SPD MP Peggy Schierenbeck. The topic is a concern for nutrition politicians: “It is a question of social justice that all children can eat healthily,” she told the taz. However, it’s not just about financial opportunities, but also about people actually implementing a healthy diet. Schierenbeck is convinced that the political framework for this is now more advanced than ever: the coalition is preparing advertising regulation for unhealthy things and project funding for healthy school meals.

Left report should provide inspiration

And the money? “Of course we also have to talk about money.” To do this, it is necessary to approach the group’s social politicians. “I will do that,” announces Schierenbeck. One person she would open doors to is the SPD MP Takis Mehmet Ali. “I don’t have the feeling that the topic has been discussed much on the surface so far,” he says. He has been sitting in the Bundestag for two years, and right at the beginning of the electoral term he campaigned for a different method for calculating standard rates. “But that wasn’t capable of gaining a majority,” says Mehmet Ali. He would prefer that social policy be fundamentally aligned with sustainability criteria.

Is it because of the costs and the difficult debates about past increases that material food poverty is avoided? It’s possible, the Lörrach MP suspects. “But at some point we have to discuss it.” He hopes the topic could be incorporated into the parliamentary process via the Petitions Committee. The Left’s report may also provide some impetus. Mehmet Ali assesses it differently than Heil: “I think the report is good.”