“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.” – Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

Terry Pratchett wrote many words on injustices within systems and on the importance of building support networks of people within said systems in his Discworld series. Men at Arms was written in 1993, the fifteenth book in the series, and the concept referred to as the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness” caught fire. It’s not a new concept — poverty taxes exist in many forms across all life, such as bulk discounts for those able to afford the large upfront cost and who have the storage space for excess material — but the phrasing of the Boots theory was particularly catchy. Economics classes have used it as a pithy example of the poverty tax issue, and many who might have never encountered the concept understood it easily through the medium of fiction.

Enter Jack Monroe. Mx. Monroe is a UK-based food writer, journalist and poverty activist. I first encountered their work with their phenomenal food blog ‘Cooking on a Bootstrap,’ which details ways to actually live on poverty wages. Monroe grew up working class and spent years as a working-poor single parent — all of the recipes and tricks they write about come from experience. Thanks to their luck with their successful blog, they have since used their greater platform to highlight inequalities, support hunger relief programs, and be a vocal activist for labor and poverty issues. Their new campaign is a price index to track basic food products, labeled the “Vimes Boots Index,” in honor of the late Sir Terry Pratchett. This past month has included the official authorization from the Pratchett estate for the name, with the author’s daughter, Rhianna Pratchett, stating that her dad would have been proud to see his work used by for anti-poverty campaigns.

But why do we need a new consumer price index (CPI) at all? The UK government is one of many that offers such a service and it has continued to do so throughout the changes of Brexit, pandemic, and global shipping disruptions. But according to Monroe on twitter, the offical UK CPI “grossly underestimates the real cost of inflation as it happens to people with the least.” According to the UK government, inflation was at 5.4%. This official number was calculated assuming purchases from a list of 700 items including legs of lamb, bedroom furniture, televisions and champagne. According to Monroe’s personal tracking in their local grocery store, non-champagne food prices were doubling and tripling. Take rice, for example. It is a common staple in poor households as it is cheap, sold in large quantities, and very easy to adjust to make it feel like a different meal from day to day. In their local store last year, Monroe noted that they could purchase a 1kg bag of rice for 45p; but last week the price was £1 for a 500g bag, or a 344% increase. Adding insult to injury, the number and variety of ‘value products’ has significantly dropped in stores. Situations like this example have been happening in grocery stores all across the British Isles, with two and a half million British residents using food banks as a result during 2021. This infuriating disconnect between the official numbers and the lived experience of the average British person caused Monroe to reach out to economists, charities, and analysts to create the new price index. The Vimes Boots Index is intended to “document the disappearance of the budget linesand the insidiously creeping prices of the most basic versions of essential items at the supermarket” and “serve as an irrefutable snapshot of the reality experienced by millions of people,” as stated by Monroe in their Observer column on January 22, 2022.

It’s not just poverty activists and those directly affected who have noticed the rise in food insecurity. Richard Walker, the managing director of the grocery chain Iceland (focusing primarily on frozen foodstuffs) gave a statement on ITV January 21st that his stores were losing customers to “food banks, and to hunger.” That customers weren’t being priced out and going to different stores, but that the next step was charity or starvation. The director then went on to pledge that their £1 range will stay at the £1 rate until the end of 2022, in order to give customers a reliable budget item. But Iceland remains a lone raft in a sea of rising prices.

The increased visibility of the extreme inflation of food prices at the lowest end of the market and the influence of the newly formed Vimes Boots Index has already had real-world impact. As of January 26, 2022, the Office for National Statistics has admitted that “one inflation rate doesn’t fit all” and Monroe reported that the office will be changing the way that they collect and report on both inflation in general and food prices in specific. These changes will take into account a wider range of income levels and household circumstances. While more accurate reporting of the problem will not make the problems with rising food costs go away, higher visibility of the issue will hopefully lead to support at a larger level than community-based support.

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Tegan has helped with beta reading and editing on this blog for a while now, and she decided she also wants to do a weekly post about topics that catch her attention. As always this is part of our effort to make ends meet, as my immigration status doesn’t allow me to get wage labor, so this blog is my only source of income.  You can sign up to help us pay the bills at patreon.com/oceanoxia. The great thing about crowdfunding is how little each contributor needs to put in; in this case as little as a dollar per month – that’s like three cents a day! Pocket change! We could use it to buy better boots!

Anyway, thanks for reading, and take care of yourselves.