81–90 of 150 posts
They should just lead with people don't have any money to buy things because wages aren't increasing to match living expenses. It cuts back some of the fig leaves
Rent is the only part of our economy in which money is forcibly taken at gunpoint by someone who never did any work to earn it.
The groceries at the grocery store are expensive because of the grocery store's rent, too.
Journalist Alfred Henry Lewis said over a century ago that civilization is only 9 meals away from anarchy. I fear in the coming years we are going to be testing that theory. Another quote that springs to mind is "Corporations behave like they're annoyed that they have to go through you to get to your money". The pandemic was a catalyst for a change in attitude by American corporations who were afraid to raise prices.…
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When I got married our food waste probably tripled. My food waste as a single guy was significantly less than married. When I had kids it probably tripled again. Much like a horse to water, you cannot explain to a 3 year old that if they don't eat all the banannas before tomorrow, they will go bad. We probably throw out 1-2 lbs of fruit a week, which is ~100 lbs a year right there. The kid might have ate 2 lbs of blu…
I have two kids and this is pure bollox. They'll eat what they are given if they are hungry enough. Or eat the leftovers yourself. Cook the fruit and make compote. We never throw out edible food, virtually zero waste. Just make an effort.
Consumers have been optimizing for convenience over being value shoppers. Grocery prices at Aldi, Walmart, Costco are amazingly low, especially when accounting for the freshness, quality, and variety of foods today vs. 30 years ago.
Many prices at those places have doubled in the last ten years or less.
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The missing datapoint is that households are having to work more labor-hours per banana every year for decades, so the energy necessary to cook banana bread is in direct competition with the energy necessary to purchase bananas. Atomic Era assumptions that a household has the time, energy, capability, appliances, and electricity budget to cook banana bread no longer reliably hold in the U.S. and cannot be taken for g…
If the point is that cost/calorie has risen too much, it's substantially worse in the cost/calorie sense to eat prepared food out of the home versus cook at home. As an aside, a quickbread like banana bread happens to be one of the simplest to make with some of the cheapest shelf-stable ingredients, and almost every home has an oven and access to the ingredients. For those who like it, I highly recommend this recipe…
I'm one of those on a much-reduced budget without access to a home oven (kitchenettes and single-top induction burners are wonderful things), without central AC at home (I do miss it but AI replaced my former industry), and live in a food tundra (slightly higher food density than a desert but more from luck than urban planning), so if it's all the same to you, I'm just going to ignore the recipe and move on.
So here's page with a line chart and downloadable CSV data, with a ~79 year lookback best as could quickly be found [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFXARA3Q086SBEA
In short: Don't worry, this one is just a 1974 or 2008 or 1992 or 1981 style blip. Hopefully. It always recovered before. (Before 1947, data is sketchy/excluded though.)
People did wait in soup and bread lines in the 1930s, I think. Check the online libraries, you'll find entire books from the early 1900s on how to make economical tasty meals on a shoestring budget.
We can do better. But it's not going to be by relying on large corps to help us out, probably.
It's going to be by reinventing the systems that are utterly broken.
[0] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Real personal consumption expenditures: Nondurable goods: Food and beverages purchased for off-premises consumption (chain-type quantity index). Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFXARA3Q086SBEA
They should just lead with people don't have any money to buy things because wages aren't increasing to match living expenses. It cuts back some of the fig leaves
Meat is like $30/lb. What a joke, I see almost no one at the butcher counter in grocery stores anymore.
???
Maybe if you're buying organic grass fed steaks every day, but chicken/pork is still available for less than $5, especially on sale. Kroger's weekly ad for Dallas, TX shows:
1. beef for $6.97/lb
2. pork for $1.99/lb
3. chicken breasts for $3.99/lb, or organic for $6.99/lb
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Meat is like $30/lb. What a joke, I see almost no one at the butcher counter in grocery stores anymore.
We buy a side of beef at a time from a farm down the street for $6/lb, up from $4 a few years ago. Can’t buy beef any other way.
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Where are you located? I think even NYCs groceries are not that expensive.
SF Bay Area. I will say that these are not Costco prices or a store where I’d be couponing, but it’s not Whole Foods either. I would love to go to Costco but unfortunately I do not have the space to accommodate the bulk quantities that I’d have to buy and consume.
i'm rounding up on eggs and bread since you might be buying a more expensive variety, and guesstimating parsley because i haven't bought it from trader joe's before. everything else is pulled from my last few shopping trips.
if you're spending $50 on this, i would highly recommend finding a new grocery store.