Yesterday I posted a pair of charts that showed the growth in various categories for spending on food eaten at home—newly updated through 2022! But over Twitter I got a complaint. First, by showing percent growth all I was demonstrating is that new sources of food (warehouse, home delivery) grew faster than conventional sources (grocery markets, convenience stores). True enough. Also, I limited myself to food eaten at home.
Those were reasonable complaints, and I figure at least four or five of you care about it. But I'm one of them, so here are revised versions of the two charts:
Once again, you can see that even when you adjust for inflation, absolute spending on food is up by $4.4 billion since 1997, or 38%. But as a percentage of income, it's up only slightly—and even that's due solely to a spike in 2022. So the revised charts show much the same thing as the originals: They're a pretty good indication that our standard of living has improved considerably in the past 25 years. We buy a lot more food but it costs us about the same share of our net income as it always has.
Do we buy more food (could this be correlated with rising calorie consumption/obesity rates?) or is the food we buy of higher quality and thus more expensive? For instance, I don't hesitate to drop $7 on a load of Dave's Killer Bread, and shudder to think of the awful grocery store bread I grew up on when there was nothing better around. Ditto for a lot of different grocery categories now.
I would imagine it's probably a mix of the two. But it would be interesting to see if this correlates with declining under-nourishment in low-income populations. If they're spending the same percentage of their income on food as before, but getting more of it, you'd expect this to go down, but I'm not sure what a good measure would be.
Maybe there's a higher level of food waste? People have been harangued for years on how they need to throw away anything past its "sell by" date (now being debunked, fortunately). Many folks optimisticly buy greens, veggies, and fruits that they don't get around to using, and off to the landfill the resulting slime goes.
Leftovers, we are also repeatedly told, are a minefield of food poisoning danger, and the guidance is to throw them away after just a day or two. I personally have found that cooked meat is good in the refrigerator for a week, in general.
So, maybe more unnecessary wastage is a contributing factor? (It's never just one thing.)
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"We buy a lot more food".
Not in evidence. What is the tonnage or calorie count of the food? We spend more *money* on food, as measured against the cost of the "basket" of all the stuff that the BLS says people normally use. What does that actually mean?
I'll bet that the average weight of US citizens has continued to increase - certainly the obesity rate has increased. Is that the right measure of the amount of food consumed? Is that how our standard of living has increased? I think the standard of living has increased as measured by the quantity and quality of electronic stuff that people have for example, but Kevin's numbers on the amount of money spent on food don't mean much in themselves. If the quality of the food consumed has anything to do with longevity we are losing there, as life expectancy continues to decrease.
US households spend only $17 billion annually on food? That's less than one tenth of one percent of GDP. What am I missing?
The US has a "cheap food" policy, designed to limit starvation?
Uh, it's nice that food is cheaper than it was years ago. But it's not "one tenth of one point of GDP" levels of cheap. The average US household expenditure on food is about 10% of gross income.
Yeah, that can't be right. Could it be weekly spending?
Maybe semi-annually in 1940 dollars.
Um... 300 million americans... so $51 per american per year?
Good catch! You can't even live on Costco ramen for that...
> We buy a lot more food but it costs us about the same share of our net income as it always has.
We don't buy a lot more food; we spend more money on food. The graphs say: we increased spending at restaurants. That dipped during covid, and then resumed. And in 2022 there was an inflation spike affecting both grocery food and restaurants, that led to a higher share of disposable income being taken over by food.
Presumably our standard of living has improved as we are going out to eat more instead of cooking for ourselves. Assuming that it's due to extra leisure time, and not being too busy to spend quality time on our food. We might need to separate out fast food expenditures from other food sources.
You can't say anything about standard of living unless you break it out by income percentiles and possibly other cohorts. It's a real problem with aggregation.
According to slightly older BLS statistics, households making $200K+ spend twice the household average and more than 3x those making $30K. There are more than 3x as many households in that lower end cohort than the high end cohort. That means wealthier people spending more on food could have an outside aggregate effect without anyone else improving their living standard.
The same BLS survey shows that households making less than $40K spend more overall than they earn which should also tell us something about how well capitalism works.
Going by Mk I eyeball, in 2009, the percentage of disposable income spent on food is something like 9.8%. Out of curiosity, I went searching around motherjones.com and found: https://www.motherjones.com/food/2012/02/america-food-spending-less/ circa 2012, but with its own chart for 2009, wherein the percentage is given as 6%. And of course the author of that article was asserting "food" was too cheap...