Where is the money going: Food Prices

[nathan28]

This is an informal attempt to gather statistical and anecdotal data. I just looked at my grocery bills for the past two weeks and have spent >$200, and am kind of shocked. My wife does probably more shopping for groceries. But I really have no idea where the fuck the money is going. I do, but I don't.

Warning: This post contains whining by someone who should just STFU and eat day-old donuts all day long. Procede to the second post for the real info, rather than self-indulgent nonsense.



PART I: Personal whining

I eat really fucking cheap. As far as I can tell when you start looking up recipes and find "popular during the Great Depression" you've passed home ec, right? E.g., salt pork, $2.15/lbs., which is 3500 calories worth, a little more than a day's worth of energy for me. Of course I can't eat that much fucking fatback, so liver pudding, which just went from $1/lbs. to $1.25, and souse, which went from $1.25 to $2/lbs. (sum ~$4.50)

Bread is somewhere between $2-3/loaf for the denser factory-made stuff, and go through 2 loaves a week. Yeah, I know, wonderbread is cheap blah blah blah but you can roll an entire loaf into your fist, which makes me feel like I've been robbed. (sum ~ 9.50)

For those of you from above the Mason-Dixon line, or the Midwest, that's all parts of the pig respectable people refuse to eats. Skin & organs.

But that's maybe a little too much animal fat, so I also eat a lot of peanut butter, or toast with olive oil.

Milk (whole) is around $3/gallon. I drink about 16 oz./day. (sum ~ 12.50)

I go through about a pound of salmon and sardines (canned, $5 for wild-caught, an extravagance), 1-2 32 oz. containers of yogurt ($2-4 worth), a pound of ham (in addition to the pig parts you and your friends don't think is disgusting), around $4/lbs. (sum ~ 22.50)

Probably about a lbs. of peanut butter, too, which is around $2.50. Also some almonds ($6/lbs), sunflower seeds ($3/lbs. hulled, I don't fucking have time to chew on seed hulls when I'm hungry) and chocolate ($6/lbs.) but only around a quarter-lbs. of those a week. Probably a quart of ice cream a week too (price varies too much. say $3 because I can't stand neopolitan and so I don't buy those picnic tubs. I used to make it at home, but realized I was only saving a few cents if that on cream, milk, sugar and whatever target flavor ingredient I added). Two or three cans of coconut milk ($3-5) (sum ~$35)

Maybe we go through 12-18 eggs a week. $3-4. (sum ~33.50 (one person))

Now, you might say, "gee that's healthy food, you should eat more boxed cereal and cookies!" I defy you to find boxed cereal as cheap per calorie as pork fat, peanut butter or even olive oil poured onto bread. I don't know about cookies, because I fucking get sticker shock every time I walk into that aisle unless the bakery has a discretely marked "day-old" section. Thanks, but I can learn how to do that at home.

I don't eat a lot of potatoes, but need to figure out how. I don't, however, know any low-involvement ways of cooking them in a short time frame. Do I want to wait an hour for a potato to bake when I want to eat?

These aren't wal-mart prices. But Wal-mart is way fucking far away. Driving for half an hour one way when there's a mid-range grocery store nearby is not very attractive.

What's missing from this list? Fruits and vegetables. This really came to my attention today when I really goddamn hungry b/c of amphetamine withdrawal and realized I could get a "discount" "family-size" package of ground pork for around $2/lbs.

My wife usually plans if doesn't prepare dinner. It is usually a salad ($5-10 worth/week), or a cabbage (almost always kale $2/for 2 portions). And beans (around $2/lbs., so $.30 for a generous serving) or something like tofu ($2-3/2 servings) or meat, usually something like chicken breast ($5/lbs.) or something similar. Likewise usually a sauce, which means onions (>$1/lbs.) and garlic (who knows, $2/for piece) and probably also has cheese (say $8/lbs. because she spends too much on it, but uses small amounts). It might not be unusual, by my count, for a dinner to run $10: $2 on kale, $7 on chicken breast, another $2 of some other vegetable, say another $1 on marginals like onions. Yes, it's the bane of my wallet and her insistence on high-margin items like boneless chicken breast and organic cabbage is something we fight over. (Thank god we don't have kids). I am going to put kale into our garden bed because she eat so much of it and can't be persuaded to switch to cheaper cabbages. But we don't eat like that every night. Last night I had peanut butter sandwiches for dinner. Tonight there is a frittata. Etc. Likewise it is one of the things we do together, so spending $$$ on it is in my judgment more or less acceptable in one way or another. digesting nesting congesting. But that's another $30-40, which is too high in my mind.

My wife probably goes through an equivalent price range worth of food, but she is driving more and has constrained, high-price options, until she decides to get obese on fast food, which probably isn't going to happen. So that looks like $150/week, if you raise my calculations to overcome optimism bias and account for purchases like warm meals and fruits and vegetables and occasional condiments and herbs.

WTF? In 2003 prices, shopping at Wal-Mart can feed two kids and one adult using an austere diet on $232/month (see post below) or a little <$500/month at Whole Paycheck Foods. But one of the places I buy food from HAS A BAND SAW WITH BONE AND MEAT ON THE BLADE IN THE CORNER. That ain't Whole Foods. And I've looked at price-points before, and the differences between whole foods and other vendors besides wal-mart are shockingly disappointing unless you buy a lot of boxed cereal and cookies. The other thing that I think is very, very clear to me, is that part of that spending--my third of it, rather than my wife's or the amount spent on shared meals--is IMO very close to hard to cut out. I could save maybe 10% if I cut out canned fish, ham and yogurt and replaced it with lentils, but would then face added prep time, etc. Saltpork and organ meat are as cheap as peanut butter, though, so if you go all righteous vegetarian on me, expect to get some hot lard thrown in your face.

Let me think about this another way. In purchasing parity price, say I went for the cheapest things I could. That'd be the fatback and potatoes. If I went with the most generous poverty-line standard, $3 in purchasing-parity dollars, I could get $.50 in fatback (700 calories) $1 in potato (around 1000 calories), a half-lbs. of souse (actual meat) with that other $.50, and then still put some peanut butter on some bread, and be relatively nourished, as far as calories go. Not fat. Just adequate. And there's not much left over. But what couldn't I get? Fruits and vegetables.

Why do I keep mentioning the fruits and vegetables thing? Two reasons. The first will get more attention shortly--they're fucking expensive. I feel like I am looking at an avoid-avoid conflict. The second, though, is that what I eat during the day is almost devoid of them! The only time I come close to having them is through dinner. I don't consider grains or starchy plants or beans to count as "vegetables," diet-wise. But IOW--my most expensive item is protein sources, and I don't get enough of that, really. Some of those "meats" above hardly qualify as anything but glorified fat sources, or creative ways to serve someone cornmeal.

Now, I'm whining. Why?

BECAUSE I LIVE IN THE FATTEST FUCKING COUNTRY ON EARTH.

So forgive me. I feel a little entitled to be able to, you know, afford to eat FIVE FUCKING STRAWBERRIES. I don't want to hear any nonsense about fast food--MOTHERFUCKER DID YOU NOT SEE THAT PART WHERE I SAID I EAT TWO FUCKING POUNDS OF PURE FUCKING PORK FAT A WEEK AND IT'S STILL CHEAPER THAN YOUR GODDAMN DAILY BIG MAC EXTRAVALUE MEAL??? DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT SOUSE IS? AND IF YOU DID WOULD YOU EAT IT? Look, I'm not picky here. I'll pull into the goddamn Bojangles for two-for-$2 sausage biscuits if I really need to. But I'm eating shit most people in the United States slice off their food and throw away. But when have sardines been a high cost item? Motherfucker, I'm practically drinking straight coconut milk, which makes your Whopper with Cheese look like diet food. Wait, when the fuck have fucking cabbages been so fucking expensive? And what about the part where I eat so much fucking toast that I have to experiment with ways to sprinkle dried herbs on it to make it interesting? Can I get a freaking cabbage or something? Please? You know, maybe make an avocado sandwich one day? Like I'm talking Ronald Reaganisms here, slathering tomato sauce on toast. WTF? And can you explain why it's more expensive to get a tomato than it is to buy a tub of red sauce? I thought this was America! I thought that everyone was fat! You'd think a couple goddamn kale leaves wouldn't cost so much money. This is Food World, right? Well, you thought wrong.

[nathan28]

Me whining about wanting to eat a banana when I'm really rather well-fed compared to the rest of the world seems unfair. But the problem with all deprivation, they say, is that deprivation is always a relative and local phenomenon. My peers--i.e., the average American--is an obese asshole who can't find Sudan on a map. I'm not, in fact, my freaking jacket fits smaller in the shoulders than it used to, and that's embarrassing. But let's look more at that relative deprivation and obesity.

PART II--Finally, Data

Above, my intuition is that fruits and vegetables are expensive.

I was right.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/whats-wrong-with-this-chart/



You can't see very well in that chart because it's frustratingly small.. It's gov't data, too, but compared to some international agencies and other gov'ts, the BLS is so straight-shooting on the raw numbers it's mind-boggling (they tend to fiddle with categories, bundles of goods, equations and definitions, etc., but not numbers numbers. They aren't going to lie about the price of milk). They report raw data with surprising honesty. But it shows the following:

The price of each food or beverage is set equal to 1 in January 1978, and the chart then shows how the price has changed since then.

It’s a fairly striking pattern. Unhealthful foods, with the exceptions of cookies (the blue line), have gotten a lot cheaper. Relative to the price of everything else in the economy, sodas (the orange line) are 33 percent cheaper than they were in 1978. Butter (dark brown) is 29 percent cheaper. Beer (gray) is 15 percent cheaper.

Fish (the yellow line), by contrast, is 2 percent more expensive. Vegetables (purple) are 41 percent more expensive. Fruits (green) are 46 percent more expensive.

The price of oranges, to take one extreme example (not shown in the chart), has more than doubled, relative to everything else. So if in 1978, a bag of oranges cost the same as one big bottle of soda, today that bag costs the same as three big bottles of soda.

IOW: Inflation-adjusted meat prices have remained constant. Dairy is oddly absent (just like how it disappears from CPI every so often... who'd have guessed?), but if we can generalize from butter, it's volatile but tends towards a constant line of best fit.

But soda, pop, whatever--you know, carbonated water with sugar--is a third cheaper. And that's with rising commodity prices.

At the same time, fruits and vegetables are 50% more expensive, and even have increased 20% since 2000.


Now, the Dep't of Agriculture is surprisingly upbeat.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Amberwaves/September04/Findings/fruitveg.htm

Eighty-six percent of the vegetables and 78 percent of the fruit cost less than 50 cents a serving—that’s 127 different ways to eat a serving of fruits and vegetables for less than the price of a 3-ounce candy bar.

Ah, but there's caveats. First off, it's the dep't of agriculture. BLS is dudes with clipboards. Dep't of Ag. is cattle-ranchers with belt buckles, guns and a smooth line. They routinely insist that it's too expensive to test for mad cow (average cost: $.01/per pound of animal flesh carved in the US/year) but have no problem supporting a chip-your-animals handout to their buddies in the RFID manufacturing and implanting business.

Second, that "78% figure" assumes you go through the store and compare cost per pound and cost per serving, favoring whichever is cheapest, across all fruits and vegetables in all forms: canned, frozen and fresh. You then run the figures in your head and pick the three cheapest items, which are "fresh, frozen, or canned" potatoes, cabbage and broccoli.



http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2371/2

I looked up Nutritiondata.com: 1 serving of cabbage is 1 cup, raw. A head of cabbage is around 2 lbs. That's somewhere between four and six servings in my mind. I'm not even sure it this is what they mean by "fresh, frozen or canned."

Third, but check this out. See what I said about backdating and the BLS? DOA doesn't give a shit. That article is dated to 2004. The figures are from 1999, "revised" in 2001. By the Dep't of Ag's figures, 1 lbs. of cabbage averages at about $.65 in 2008. So your average cabbage is $1.95, say $2. To get to that $.04/serving figure in the chart above, you'd have to "serve" one fiftieh (1/50) of that head of cabbage to each person at your dinner table. Even assuming that prices have doubled from the "revised" 2001 figures--according to the DOA, it's only been a 50% increase--that doesn't make it much more generous. You're still talking under a quarter-cup, which is, presumably, going to reduce when cooked. Guess you better serve it raw, unless you think putting a tablespoon of cabbage on a plate is a "serving." But hell, "fresh, frozen or raw" implies you're open to all possibilities, right?

http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do?documentID=1397

[Perelandra]

Thank you for the great topic. I can help with the problems you've listed, no doubt others can too. Just want to say, you are on the right track. Just hope you know where the pork fat comes from.

This is mainly a placeholder, but FYI potatoes are almost the easiest thing to grow in containers, outside of garlic, kale and lettuce. Forgo those $3 bags of greens.

[nathan28]

But... why?

PART III: Speculation

So, speaking of specious data, here's a chart:



Now, that's from the Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group not known for doing anything besides telling everyone on earth to stop eating animals, and then putting together slap-dash, poorly-analyzed studies about, e.g., rats dying prematurely when they're fed nothing but beef--yeah, duh.

Likewise, I want to note that recently the UN noted that its figures of the amount of pollution generated by meat and dairy farming were accurate--but in that particular comparison, they understated, significantly, the other sources of pollution against which meat & dairy were compared, which ended up, relatively speaking, halving the contribution IIRC.

But that's neither here nor there. What is curious is that the apparent subsidization has kept prices constant while others have climbed. Now, what it's too late in the evening for me to look at is the actual data on meat vs. corn subsidies in the US, because I suspect that PCRM has "found" an explanation that would align with experienced reality but is not, in fact, borne out in actuality.

And I"m done for the night, anyway, unless Jeff opens the Fire Pit. So put in personal anecdotes and fact-finds.

[nathan28]

Thank you for the great topic. I can help with the problems you've listed, no doubt others can too. Just want to say, you are on the right track. Just hope you know where the pork fat comes from.

This is mainly a placeholder, but FYI potatoes are almost the easiest thing to grow in containers, outside of garlic, kale and lettuce. Forgo those $3 bags of greens.

Oink oink oink--nearby. Pigs give me dirty looks, and they should, because piglets look like meat on legs, etc. That's more for the self-sufficiency forum--I kind of want to keep this thread for personal anecdotes and for data. OTOH if you have guesstimates figures on the costs of plant starts or seeds etc. that'd be good too. Because in the past few years I can't help but notice food prices really seem to have climbed.

Most cabbages are pretty hardy, though, I still have some collards growing in the back I planted last May, they only just flowered. I'm just concerned I"m not going to have time to tend to an actual garden this year, even though I spent a lot of time putting a large bed, finding dog shit free grass and leaves for compost, etc., last year.

Can't you do potatoes in soda bottles? I'm pretty sure I've seen that.

[barracuda]

Well at least you've got some speed.

I think you have to decide what it is you want - do you want to eat well or cheaply or both? Eating well is about freshness of ingredients and excellence of preparation. There are no substitutes. Eating cheaply is about "poor food". You can live quite well these days on ramen noodles at 25 cents per meal or less. I happen to like them very much, but I don't eat them as much as I used to because I'm all about fresh vegetables and fruits these days. And that's all about the farmers market.

You've got to get as close to the producers as you can and buy what is locally available. The farmers markets have seasonal goods, and you buy what they have, all fresh, in bulk if you want. Cheap.

Of course, I live in California. There are six different varieties of avocados growing in superabundance within two blocks of my front door, and the fruit falls so hard and fast that the neighbors appreciate any help in clearing out the deadfall. (There's a wonderful avocado variety which is about the size of an plum which can be eaten skin and all, and has a delicious, nutty flavor like a walnut mousse. "Take all you want!", the neighbor said, which means a five gallon bucket full every now and again while they last.) I also have an orange tree in my backyard which produces about a hundred of the most sweet and succulent navals each year beginning in November, a gigantic Bartlett pear tree (produces about three or four bushels a year), a huge Boysenberry bush, a machintosh apple tree, a loquat tree, a persimmon which produces more than you can eat, and my neighbors have similar situations, so there is no shortage of fruit to be had around here. Apricots, pomegranites, tangerines, lemons, limes, blackberries - I know where all the fruiting trees and bushes are in the nearby parks, and take advantage of them.

Then, every year I plant four or five varieties of tomatoes - heirloom tomatoes, plum tomatoes, cherrie tomatoes (several varieties of those. Last year i had a vine over nine feet tall tendrilling up a japanese maple tree in the backyard.) Yes, the plants cost about fifteen dollars for five of them, but then you get literally hundreds of tomatoes. Sometimes I'll grow a few peppers, too.

Potatoes? The secret is a microwave oven. Nuke the fuckers for just a few minutes rather than baking. they actually turn out better than oven-cooked after you get the hang of it. It's all about the timing, but it only takes about four or five minutes to bake a pretty big potato that way. Cheap.

"Poor food", or peasant fare, is prepared from cheap, local ingrediants, and starch. Pasta, dude. Noodles. There is great, great poor food that exists. It's called french cuisine. I recommend you get a good cookbook, and get the fuck away from that fucking souse. Jesus. That's just gross. You eat that kind of shit and do crank and there's no deodorant in the world that can cut the stink of your body odor. None.

Oh did I mention the smelt runs out here? Several times a year the smelt wash up on the beaches and you can gather them up by the truckload if you want. People do. Two words, my man - fried smelt sandwiches. They fucking rock. I usually buy the huge round loafs of fresh sourdough bread that's available hereabouts. It's around three bucks for a weekl's worth of toast and sandwiches. But milk?? Who the fuck under two years of age really needs to suck on a cow's teat, nathan? That shit is bad for you, man. Try water. Pure fresh tap water. Mmmmm. I like it cold. Very, very cold, and surrounded by bourbon in a short glass.

But back to the whole fish thing. Fish is bad for you too, full of petro poisons and heavy metals, but it's very tasty. I like salmon and mahi-mahi and swordfish, which'll run you about five-six bucks a meal for two persons.

But cheap stuff? Ramen, rice and beans, pasta. Where I live, every grocery store has an entire aisle devoted to ramen noodle bowls. Some of them are astoundingly good, while others taste like old socks and fire. But soup is where it's at if you're poor. Lotsa soup. Big ol' pot o' water, and as many ingredients as you can afford. Water, the main ingredient in soup, can be surprisingly affordable. Yum! Delicious water - it's what's for dinner!

[nathan28]

Well at least you've got some speed.

Not just that, but a psychiatrist who recognizes I'm an upstanding citizen and who thinks I need a script for it! Took a while, but it beats having to looking at a bag and thinking, "hey, I wonder what the difference between the brown crystals and this white powder is." And thanks ins. co., for picking up most of the tab! You won't cover surgery, but hey, who cares? Now if I can just coast black president on this into Socialized Fascist Islamic Drug Addict Peacenik Obamacare black president, it'll be amazing.

I think you have to decide what it is you want - do you want to eat well or cheaply or both? Eating well is about freshness of ingredients and excellence of preparation...

You've got to get as close to the producers as you can and buy what is locally available. The farmers markets have seasonal goods, and you buy what they have, all fresh, in bulk if you want. Cheap.

Of course, I live in California...

See, that's the thing. You all even have olive trees out there, planted by Jesus when he founded America. I actually do have a farm share, but they don't start harvesting for another few weeks.

But cheap stuff? Ramen, rice and beans, pasta...

Yum! Delicious water - it's what's for dinner!

Mostly I do cook with starch and fat, and think that cheap fare can be done well, considering all it really takes is some fat, an onion, some garlic and a target starch.

I really want to know WTF happened to vegetables, though. I'm pretty sure that if "beans and greens" used to be a staple that greens weren't so goddamn expensive at market--but then again, everyone was probably rooting through their neighbors' yards, but that was back when pokeweed was "poisonous but still edible." I may invent a variant, "kudzu and beans" (with, just for you, barracuda, a slice of souse). But it still doesn't explain the shift in price structure. Yes, my concern here is, sadly, technical, historical, something like that. I want to know WTF happened that the market will spend $3 on a tiny-ass cabbage, when regardless prices on beef remain really goddamn low. And why, e.g., it's so hard to find primal cuts, and why they tend to run pricier (but why a half cow is still cheap), but a "family pack" of beef is cheap, etc. I mean honestly, it's simply not possible for a box of spinach to cost less than a much heavier piece of a cow, but it is. There's a productive or consumptive or both thing happening here. I'm not sure what the explanation is. I remember in being in a market in Brazil and ground beef was almost 4X what the same piece would have cost in the US--but the explanation there is that it's almost entirely an export good and farmland is more, um, "created" out of jungle, etc.

But I want to understand. I can't find the link, but I know that the founder of Prevention magazine was obsessed with bowel regularity, mostly because Americans ate diets almost devoid of fiber--which would just suggest that we ate potatoes and beef all day, but that's not true for the entire colonial-and-later history, if you look at the "heritage" foods. And corn, squash, etc., the other New World crops that the Indians foolishly gave to white people so they wouldn't starve, aren't "meat and potatos". So, something happened. And I can't find a clip of that scene of colonists eating belt and shoe leather in Jamestown in The New World, so I don't know.

I've never been able to figure out how to microwave a potato successfully.

Ramen noodles are, though, more expensive than just getting bulk grains, though obviously faster, but i'll stick with regular pasta, which is, at least the last time I looked, not a big difference on price-point.

[Maddy]

Okay here's my obligatory add-in (mainly because its personal, and I've studied it due to that) but! More Americans are obese, but it has nothing to do with health. Poverty (eating "poor", or perhaps just eating poorly) is the major cause of American obesity. Cheap foods = fat = obese = malnutrition/unhealthy. When you have to spread that meat and veggies thin (or can't afford the meat, period), can't afford the hugely expensive organic/health foods, and have to stuff your body with fillers (pasta, rice, breads, etc.) you end up screwed. If you don't have the ability to have a garden (and guess what, even if you have land, which most Americans don't, gardening is still fairly pricey) you can't grow your own. Grabbing food here and there from where you can (foraging) is great! But many cities don't have places to forage.

This is a societal issue as well as a health issue as well as an economic issue.

This issue sucks.

/rant

[nathan28]

Retail price for beef fell about 7%, unadjusted, for 2008-2009. OTOH, the outlook is showing decreased stocks of cows and chickens, so higher prices are anticipate.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/MeatPriceSpreads/

Collard greens--a cold-weather crop--average 2.62/lbs. for fresh, and around 1.50 for frozen--but the only ERS data I can find is from 1999. Assuming inflation from then, that's $3.34-more expensive than cows, with by simple fact of more involved production--you know, feeding, vaccines, etc.,--should be pricier. Turnips, another cold-weather crop, are about half as much per pound--with frozen again being cheapest by about the same differential. IDK about you, but I've never seen frozen turnips.

[nathan28]

Significantly, sugar prices since the '30s have required sugar-exporting countries to pay "significant rents" to sell in both the US and Europe--domestic sugar prices are held in the US somewhere around 100% higher. Tariffs for you, no trade restrictions and more subsidies for us, right? So Haiti is a failed state because of, you know, local corruption.

http://greedgreengrains.blogspot.com/2010/01/haiti-and-us-sugar-policy.html

[Perelandra]

Written a few years ago, but still illustrative.

You Are What You Grow

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: April 22, 2007

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

More at Link

[nathan28]

I'm not understanding where the data in that Pollan article comes from.

Here 1 hostess cupcake, retailing around $1 on amazon for a 24-pack, is 180 calories. Carrots are comparable at that price point calorie-for-calorie judging by ERS and Nutritiondata.com. Likewise I'm only getting half that number with corn-syrup juice.

I do, OTOH, find a huge discrepancy with noodles and pasta and to a lesser extent bread. Which is actually not that surprising. None of that is really surprising, to take a long-term (as in, "we're all dead") view. What is surprising is that fruits and vegetables re so damn expensive, even in season. It looks like any degree of variety simply isn't affordable for the bottom 40% in the US.

[nathan28]

KFC's Double Down--two fried chicken patties with cheese and bacon.

http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2010/04/12/kfc-unveils-bunless-chicken-sandwich/

How much will it cost? About $5 and 540 calories (460 for the grilled version), putting it on caloric par with fast-food standards like the McDonald's Big Mac or a large order of french fries at Burger King.

To be very clear I actually have little problem with the supposed "excess" this signifies. Where were the cries of doom when someone first fried a potato? Nowhere, and frankly this is probably better for you.

On edit, at 53 g of protein, 11 g of starch, 32 g of fat, for $5 that's fairly reasonable, price-wise, for a prepared meal.

A large fries has identical calories (540) but obviously significantly more from starch, and around 50% of the price, somewhere around $2.60 US, varying by location. Which still shows a huge difference between the raw material costs and the final price, and potatoes *are* a huge crop in the US. IOW, a much higher-margin item for the fast food places than two pieces of chicken and some bacon.

[Perelandra]

I'm not understanding where the data in that Pollan article comes from.

Here 1 hostess cupcake, retailing around $1 on amazon for a 24-pack, is 180 calories. Carrots are comparable at that price point calorie-for-calorie judging by ERS and Nutritiondata.com. Likewise I'm only getting half that number with corn-syrup juice.

I do, OTOH, find a huge discrepancy with noodles and pasta and to a lesser extent bread. Which is actually not that surprising. None of that is really surprising, to take a long-term (as in, "we're all dead") view. What is surprising is that fruits and vegetables re so damn expensive, even in season. It looks like any degree of variety simply isn't affordable for the bottom 40% in the US.

I'm not sure about the figures, regardless, I don't entirely agree with your conclusion. Here are a few ideas:

How to Start Saving Money on Organic Produce

1 Join a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. A CSA is an economic partnership between a local farmer and a nearby community. Members of a CSA either pledge or put up in advance an annual fee to cover the farm's anticipated production costs during the harvest season (typically May to October). In return, you get a weekly bounty of fresh, sustainably grown vegetables for a lot less than you'd pay at the supermarket.

2 Grow your own vegetables (and fruit, depending on where you live) in your backyard, but ditch the chemical nasties and go au naturale. Apartment dwellers can alternatively sign up for a plot with their neighborhood community garden.

3 Shop at your local farmers' market, where organic choices frequently abound. Because you're buying directly from the grower, you don't have to pay the additional premium that middlemen (such as supermarkets and grocers) tack on.

4 Join a food co-op. A co-op is a business that is owned and operated by its members, all of whom have an equal say in how it operates. They also receive an equal share in any profits if the co-op is open to the public. By pooling together their buying power, members are able to negotiate with wholesalers for better prices.

5 Don't just stick to one supermarket--explore your options. Note the differences in price lists from store to store and keep a lookout for sales. Sign up for any mailing lists that will keep you apprised of price cuts and special offers.

6 If finances are really tight, buy only the organic versions of fruits and vegetables that contain an especially high concentration of pesticides. (Examples include apples, strawberries, nectarines, spinach and potatoes.) You can buy conventionally grown produce for everything else.

In some places, people can use food stamps or WIC benefits to buy food at farm markets.

Also, FYI, almost everyone can grow something, whether it's in a container, in a vacant lot, or at a community garden. They're popping up like mushrooms. (ha) One of your questions was about seeds and starts, of course they're cheap and what you use depends on your comfort level. I already mentioned a few no-fail crops, which can be some of the more expensive to buy, as you noted. Take kale, for instance. A packet of seed is a couple bucks and will grow more than you can eat. When it looks likely to overwhelm you, since kale is mostly eaten cooked, blanch and freeze it. Let one plant (or more) go to seed and you'll have seeds forever.

Fruit trees, shrubs, and berries cost a little more to plant, but it's just the initial investment, as they're mostly perennial. There are dwarf fruits of all kinds and container blueberries, for example. No acreage required. Or buy lots of local fruit in season to get it cheap and freeze it, most freezes well. Throw fruit in a blender with yogurt and/or juice for a healthy treat. Alternatively, get to know your neighbors and ask for excess fruit. People are happy to give it away. I don't know about your region, but around here a lot goes to waste.

The subject is timely to me, as I'm considering volunteering with a local food bank that recently bought a good-sized nursery to supplement their operations. They won't just donate staple food, they'll donate and teach people how to grow and prepare the good stuff. People only need the desire to learn something other than what commercials tell them, and that seems to be growing.

Edit: Potatoes. Always cook too much so you have leftovers. Chop smallish and they'll boil in ~20 minutes. Boil some garlic with if you like. Mash, or toss w/ butter and dill, or make salad w/ mayo or oil and vinegar. Hint: there are some good recipes in Self Suff. forum. Didya know the Irish once lived on them, along with some greens, eggs and dairy, and maybe an occasional chicken or rabbit?

More later.

[IanEye]

when i was a grad student at Emerson i used to always have a tupperware bowl of granola in my backpack. i would go to the Starbucks at the corner of Charles and Beacon, walk right in and use the milk that they had out for the paying customers coffee to eat my granola with.
for the most part i think i was a source of amusement to the barristas.

also, i figured out the meeting schedules at the Harvard Business School and would always swoop down right after a meeting of faculty bigwigs and grab a bunch of good food. salad, roast beef sandwiches, french onion soup.
those guys ate really well.