The cart gets lighter just as the talk about eating well becomes more and more serious. Fruit, vegetables, cereals, legumes, fish, fresh foods: on paper, the healthy diet remains the most cited, most recommended, most evoked model. At the checkout, however, it takes the form of a precise figure. And that figure, in Italy, changes a lot depending on where you live, the time of year and even your age. In some cases it exceeds 200 euros per month.
A study published in the scientific journal gives measure to this gap Quality & Quantity and signed by Stefano Marchetti of the University of Pisa together with Ilaria Benedetti of the University of Tuscia, Haoran Yang of the University of Pisa and Mathias Silva Vazquez of the University of Rome Tor Vergata. The work analyzed the cost of healthy and sustainable food baskets, effectively built on the model of the Mediterranean diet, distinguishing five groups: adult men, adult women, adolescents, young children and the elderly.
The research covers the period from August 2021 to March 2024 and is based on 326,721 price surveys relating to 167 food products distributed in 107 Italian provinces. The data comes from the Price and Tariff Observatory of the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy. The picture that emerges has an almost brutal concreteness: economic access to a healthy diet follows very different geographies and moves with a seasonal rhythm that weighs on families.
Between spring and summer the bill goes up for almost everyone
The heaviest burden remains that of adult men. In the spring and summer months it steadily exceeds 200 euros, starting from lower levels in 2021 and arriving, in the autumn-winter months, around 150-160 euros towards the end of the period observed. Over the three-year period the overall increase is around 20%.
For adult women the movement follows a similar trajectory. The average monthly cost goes from around 175 euros to around 208 euros in the hot months, while in the cold months it rises from around 130 euros to around 156 euros. Here too, the overall growth for the three-year period remains close to 19-20%.
The elderly are placed in an intermediate range, with values that increase little by little until reaching around 160-170 euros in the hot months and around 120 euros in the cold ones. For them too, the overall increase remains around 20%, a sign that price pressure is distributed widely, without sparing the older ages.
For teenagers, the average cost goes from around 109 euros to around 131 euros in the spring-summer months and from around 65 euros to around 78 euros in autumn and winter. Growth over the period considered is just over 20%.
The group of young children, however, shows the most interesting exception of the entire study. Here the basket goes from around 49 to 62 euros in the hot months and from around 65 to 79 euros in the cold months. The overall increase is between 20% and 25% and is the only case in which the cost is higher in winter than in summer. It is a detail that immediately shifts attention: the price calendar does not affect everyone in the same way or even with the same logic.
In the North the average and maximum baskets move more
The study also highlights a structural difference along the peninsula. The northern provinces record higher average prices and maximum basket prices. In the South, however, higher minimum prices often emerge. It is a less intuitive distinction than it seems and explains well how the issue of accessibility goes beyond the simple idea of ”where it costs more”.
According to Stefano Marchetti, a possible explanation lies in the lesser presence of large-scale retail trade in some southern areas. Where competition is weaker and economies of scale are less intense, the lowest available price also tends to remain higher. Translated into daily life, it means that looking for economic alternatives can be more difficult precisely in those territories where every expense margin weighs more.
The work also insists on another, very concrete aspect: we need monitoring tools capable of following these fluctuations and we need policies that are attentive to the most vulnerable groups. Because a healthy diet remains formally advisable for everyone, however its real cost changes with age, with caloric needs, with the season and with the territory. Within this variability an important part of food inequality plays out.
The final data remains there, simple and inconvenient. Eating well in Italy costs more than yesterday, rises almost everywhere with the summer, exceeds 200 euros a month in some baskets and is distributed unequally between North and South. The Mediterranean diet continues to be a very strong cultural reference. The wallet, on the other hand, asks every month to account for the distance between the model and reality.
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