ISSUE 02 · OCTOBER 2026 · PEOPLE
Can healthy food actually be afforded?
What good is nutrition advice if nourishing food is beyond reach?
Cost begins with prices. Affordability also includes income and the other essentials a household must pay for.
Follow the evidence ↓Values reproduce the cited source’s scope; they are not estimates for one field, river, package or person.
01 · BEGIN WITH THE FINDING
The measures answer different questions
SOFI 2026 estimates that 645 million people faced hunger in 2025 and about 2.1 billion experienced moderate or severe food insecurity. Separately, it estimates 2.69 billion people could not afford a healthy diet. Hunger, food insecurity and healthy-diet affordability are related; they are not interchangeable. A careful story keeps their definitions and denominators attached to the numbers.
02 · FOLLOW THE MECHANISM
Cost is not affordability
The report defines the cost of a healthy diet as the minimum expenditure needed to buy the least-expensive locally available foods that satisfy a healthy-diet basket. Affordability compares that cost with income after essential non-food expenses. In 2025, the global average cost reached 4.28 purchasing-power-parity dollars per person per day. That benchmark is not the price of one household’s cart and should not be converted into a local budget without local data.
03 · KEEP THE CLAIM BOUNDED
The price accumulates after the farm
SOFI attributes 70–75% of consumer food prices to post-farmgate activity, with processing, logistics and wholesale contributing up to 40% of total cost. Roads, cold chains, reliable energy, storage and retail therefore belong beside production and income support. The answer is not to blame a shopper for choosing what is affordable, storable and quick. It is to make nourishing food easier to produce, move, buy and use—while protecting the livelihood of the people growing it.
THE EVIDENCE ABOARD
Follow the source.
THE STORY CONTINUES · PASSENGER
The public finding opens the question. The deeper Track tests its limits.
Continue into the study design, system relationships, practical questions and the evidence still missing.
Continue the Passenger investigation →THE ORANGE · FOLLOW THE QUESTION
Ask where it goes next.
The Orange now recognizes this investigation’s vocabulary and routes the question back to reviewed reporting.
Ask The Orange →