Soaring food prices and persistent poverty are forcing poor households to replace nutritious food with cheaper meals to stave off hunger.
But researchers seeking solutions are coming up with new high-protein foodstuffs made from indigenous crops, such as sweet potato baby porridge and pasta made from African flour.
A new study of consumer food choices led by the University of Pretoria (UP) has confirmed what field workers already know: a large share of the urban poor have no choice but to eat less-nutritious food requiring less time — and electricity — to prepare. This emerged from focus group discussions informing a new food choice questionnaire developed for local conditions.
UP researcher Nomzamo Dlamini said, “What we found when we talked about health in our South African context is that people know what healthy food is, the problem is constraints getting it.”
The new questionnaire is now on trial at several locations worldwide, to gather more accurate food security information. Most existing questionnaires do not accurately capture the concerns of lower-income groups. “We tried to make it such that the distribution of respondents represents the country’s demographic distribution. We also targeted respondents in urban cities of the various locations,” Dlamini said of the home-grown questionnaire, started as part of a broader global Innofood Africa project funded by the EU.
Innofood Africa aimed to transform the food system in some African countries, including South Africa, to address interlinked problems of malnutrition, inequality and climate change.
A notable focus of Innofood Africa was developing a range of suitable foods that were cheaper, healthier and more accessible. Flour from orange-fleshed sweet potato, rich in fibre and low in starch, is being developed into baby food and a thickener in soups. Dehulled cereal grain and pulse flour is being used to develop nutrient-dense instant porridges to combat malnutrition. There’s also a new gluten-free pasta from sorghum flour, and sorghum rice.
“We feel more people are heading towards the poverty line,” said Professor Naushad Emmambux from UP who headed South Africa’s Innofood Africa contribution. “People cannot always afford to buy food ... So one needs to look at ways for them to buy fortified food — that is what this project was partly about — looking at different local ingredients that one can mix together to make more convenient food for local buyers.”
The project coincides with worrying statistics on food security and household income, including:
- A total of 23% of South African children live in severe child food poverty and are 50% more likely to suffer from life-threatening malnutrition, said a Unesco report released this month.
- A total of 36.5% of South African households are food secure, with 63.5% being food insecure, according to the latest Human Sciences Research Council national food and nutrition security survey. Of the food insecure, 17.5% experienced severe food insecurity.
- In May 2024, the average cost of the Household Food Basket (family of four) was R5,330 — more than the national minimum wage of R4,633, based on Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group’s (PMBEJD) monthly household affordability index, which tracks the prices of a basket of 44 basic items from 47 supermarkets and 32 butcheries in SA’s major cities.
Rising costs, particularly of staple foods and electricity, had pushed poor households into survival mode, said PMBEJD programme coordinator Mervyn Abrahams. “If electricity becomes too expensive, then you have to do one of two things: buy things that don’t need refrigerating, or buy food that doesn’t take long to cook.”
It’s not that they don’t know anything about nutrition or don’t want to buy eggs or fruit, it’s just that with the little amount they have ... they have to make these horrible choices
— PMBEJD programme coordinator Mervyn Abrahams
This explained a shift to items like two-minute noodles instead of longer-cooking samp. “It’s not that they don’t know anything about nutrition or don’t want to buy eggs or fruit, it’s just that with the little amount they have ... they have to make these horrible choices.”
The prevalence of high-starch, low-protein foods aggravates both malnutrition and obesity, in that households get “too little of the right food and too much of the wrong food”, said David Harrison, CEO of South African philanthropic foundation DG Murray Trust, engaged in preventing nutritional stunting in children. “The most immediate thing that needs to be done is that we’ve got to protect and secure a basket of higher-protein foods that are affordable to families,” said Harrison.
The trust is campaigning for this in talks with government and some retailers. “It would require industry to waive their mark-up on those products, and for government to provide a retail subsidy for those same products. If they did that, we could reduce the cost price of that basket of goods by about 25%. That is an absolute priority.”
Other longer-term interventions included increasing the level of the child support grant and supporting smallholder farming to bolster local crop production, said Harrison. Lower-income participants in the UP study highlighted the difficulty juggling a household budget with health considerations. “You can go to the food streets vendors and buy a plate of tripe. (But) at (a retailer) you can buy the same full portion of tripe (uncooked) for R400 and something. And, when you cook it, it takes up a lot of electricity units. You must cook it for around three hours. However, you can find one that is already cooked at R30,” said one participant.
Another said, “I will look at the price first. When money is not enough, you forget that you can get sick, you take the cheaper one. I cannot buy a skinless chicken when I cannot afford it.”
