What is Driving the Rising Cost of Food?
Unless you haven’t gone to the grocery store or to a restaurant in the past six months, you may have noticed that the price of food has continued to rise. In fact, because you’re a savvy Queercents reader, I’ll bet that you already knew that food inflation is twice the rate of inflation overall. A few weeks ago, the Nation’s Restaurant News remarked that we are facing ‘œthe perfect economic storm’ as far as food prices go.
The cost of fuel is now solidly above the $4 mark, which makes both food production and delivery more expensive. At the same time, more and more farmland has been diverted to the production of corn for ethanol. This has caused the price of corn and other grains, such as wheat and barley, to rise because ethanol production directly trades off with the production of other crops. Furthermore, the switch to ethanol has inflated the price of meat since most factory farmed cattle and chicken are fed a corn-based diet.
The third contributing factor in this economic storm is global climate change. The combination of droughts and floods has also affected the amount of food that America produces. And while we haven’t seen the level of devastation or experienced the food riots that have hit developing countries, Americans are feeling the crunch.
How, then, can you make your food dollar stretch? In the coming weeks, I’ll be offering simple tips for making your food budget more flexible. Today I offer this one suggestion: make slight substitutions in your diet to get a better deal in the check out line. For instance, try switching to soy milk instead of cow’s milk. A price comparison at Trader Joe’s is illustrative. A gallon of cow’s milk costs $3.19. But a gallon of soy milk costs $2.29. In future pieces I’ll be offering recipes along with food budgeting tips. Who knew that saving money could be so delicious?
May I add 4&5?
4) The average Chinese person now consumes 110 pounds of meat per year, up from 44 pounds two decades ago. It takes 10 pounds of grain to produce one pound of pork and 20 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef.
5) As the world’s middle class increases, rising food cost isn’t immediately tempered by a drop in demand. On one hand, this is a positive, fewer people in the world going hungry, but it also means less price elasticity, so small increases in cost don’t reduce demand, and that cost sticks.
Joe
Serena: I’m really looking forward to this series… I suspect it will be both informative and useful with the recipes.
Joe brings up a good point about the world’s burgeoning middle class. In June, the Financial Times put together an in depth study on The Rising Cost of Food. One article, called “We cannot go on eating like this” expands on this subject of per capita consumption:
For the politically minded, you can also click through to: A 10-point plan for tackling the food crisis.
Joe and Nina – Absolutely! I’ll be talking about this more in my next piece, which will be about rethinking meat. But you both make an important point – we all want to see the standard of living rise amongst the world’s poor. And the catch 22 occurs when that goal is realized and we have more people who can afford to consume more.
I remember reading somewhere that in the Occident a piece of meat as large or larger than the other side dishes is called a meat dish while in the Orient adding 4 or 5 ounces of meat to a large dish of Rice and Vegetables entitles it to the label.
As another side note I have several cookbooks from Taiwan published in both Chinese and English that among other things states that the food we eat in Oriental Restaurants is NOT the normal food they eat..it is Feast or Festival Food for Special Occassions.
I’ve noticed this may be true sometimes when I shop the markets…Mamasan who owns one was enjoying her lunch one day…a Bowl of Rice and a Pickled Pigs Foot.
~ Roland
I started grocery shopping and cooking thriftily about three years ago and I have saved about £10,000 all of which is now sitting in my bank account.
I have replaced most of our meat meals with beans, eggs or cheese. We eat a lot of vegetables. I make all our meals and we rarely eat out and NEVER buy takeaways.
I buy own brands and especially the ‘value’ labels. I only buy meat when it is on offer and never buy cheap chicken or pork as the animals are raised in cruelty.
My grocery shopping went from £550 a month to £250 a month and that includes our petrol – which is much more expensive here, but our cars do more miles to the gallon, ours does 45.
It can be done.