‘Food poverty in Scotland not acceptable says sturgeon’ tweeted the Joseph Rowntree Foundation this morning. I suppose if you were a sturgeon, then yes, you would get worried about food poverty, on the grounds that it wouldn’t do much for the consumption of caviar. But more seriously, I’m intrigued by the definition of food poverty being used here.

The key UK government measures take 60% of the national median income as the poverty line. But here’s where it gets terribly weaselly: the average annual earnings of full-time workers in the UK rose by 1.4% to £26,500 in the year to April 2012…the last full year for which I can find reliable numbers. Recent evidence does suggest, however, that hours worked and earnings per hour have produced a smaller and smaller group of folks on that salary. So when the Coalition says it would like to redefine poverty downwards, it’s really just trying to make its alleged ‘job creation’ track record look better than it is – viz, a sham wrapped inside a scam tied up with flim and painted the colour of flam.

On the other side of this endlessly sterile debate sits the right-on, uncommercial “fairness” army that constantly uses daft and overdone emotives like “unacceptable” for anything it doesn’t like – be that Israel, Viktor Orban, or genital mutilation. The argument on this side of the tragically debased coinage is that, in different regions and different households, people earning far more than £26,000 will still be in poverty because tight money excludes them from subscribing to magazines like Prospect and The New Statesman.

As with all such ambiguous mud-spinning, both sides offer a grain of truth. It’s easy for me to say that my total income isn’t far off 60% of £26,500 so-why-TF-can’t-they-live-on-that…..but I don’t have three kids at school and a mortgage. Equally, the facile argument that everyone deserves to be on that salary “otherwise we aren’t civilised” fails to recognise the existence of each individual’s will to make lifestyle choices – or the reality of hard workers and lazy arseholes existing in parallel.

The food poverty debate is another example of what I term Monochrome Analysis….when what we really need is Technicolor examination to render the infinite shades of social experience truly apparent. Just as one-size-fits-all medicine says ‘all salt bad’ (which is complete bollocks) so too both Left (all food poverty bad) and Right (all food poverty a myth) assertions have an equal right to reside in the male scrotal sac.

Take, for example, the relative pricing of different food forms in the context of relative cooking skills and varied creative ability to ‘make do’ with what one can afford. Every audit of ‘convenience food’ – which these days in volume terms largely means ready-cooked frozen pizzas, oven-chips, prepared sandwiches and baked beans – shows that the people who can least afford it pay a premium in order to eat poor quality food.

So then: why has this happened? Is it because the Evil Right wants to maximise profit on junk – with the beneficial side-effect of all the welfare-spongers dying young? Or is it because the Correct Left thirty years ago dismissed the idea of teaching cooking skills as Retrograde Male-Chauvinist Repression?

At this point – as so often in 2014 – we have entered the land where a currency called Truth is backed by the Grain.

We live in a world where skin-deep analysis and viciously bitten sounds fool most of the people all of the time. So when it comes to flushing out the flagrant falsehood, a good start would be to interrogate every simplistic word association.

Food Poverty is not a relative term. Food poverty is nothing more or less than children going to bed feeling hungry, mothers feeling desperate, and fathers diving down into depression. Lurking behind that reality, we will always find ignorance.

In the East, it is almost always the result of ignorance among the uneducated populace. In the West, it is – equally often – the result of an over-educated élite blissfully ignorant of the lives that exist beneath its privileged position.

Yesterday at The Slog: An inflated Draghi ego ignores a deflationary tiger