You’re Not Paying Enough For Food

Don’t get angry at me, somebody has to say it

If you’re not getting concerned about climate change and food production, you’re not paying attention.

I also know that it is very, very hard to pay attention. (Billionaires and corporations know this too, so that’s why they do just exactly what they want, knowing that most citizens are just trying to keep food on the table and the lights on and don’t have any energy left to fight back.) I’ve got kids and an elderly mother and a sad little 401(k) that is in no way ready for my own retirement. My husband has health issues and everyone I know is dealing with something.

But here’s something I do manage to notice: I am paying a lot more at the grocery store than I used to.

Guess what? That’s what everyone WANTS you to notice. If you get mad about food prices, chances are you’ll have less energy to fight the much bigger elephants in the room: housing, healthcare, and transportation. Oh, and also billionaires.

Here’s what I want you to do. Don’t get mad about food prices. Get mad about everything else.

I grew up on a farm, but I am no longer a farmer.

Want to know why? Because farming (especially on any kind of small, family dairy or crop farm) is insanely hard. It basically means you can’t have a family because you won’t have one single free minute to go out to dinner with your spouse or attend your kid’s band concert. My dairy-farmer dad didn’t attend one single concert or event I was in during twelve years of school, with the exception of one play I was in during my junior year. (He went to that one because we put on the play at a restaurant, and he could combine attending with eating a meal, leaving him time to do all his other work around those two hours “off.”)

But I digress. Small farming is insanely hard and is basically gone.

So what do we have now? Yup, factory farms. Factory farms, especially those farming meat, torture their workers right along with the animals they’re raising and harvesting. We have industrial agriculture, where Monsanto controls all the seeds (and overcharges the farmers for them), and which relies on massive amounts of irrigation and chemicals.

Factory farming is good at pumping out a lot of food fast. It is amazing at pumping out enough food for an obese citizenry and for export and does it all at an amazingly low, held down by efficiency, cost.

But it still has a cost. A very high environmental cost that is getting higher every day.

You may think you’re getting ripped off at the grocery store. You’re really not. According to a 2022 USDA report, “U.S. consumers spent an average of 11.3 percent of their disposable personal income on food in 2022.”

Let’s dig a little deeper into that report, and also look at some other industries for comparison.

There’s a lot of fascinating stuff about the price (and cost) of food in that USDA report. Here are the items that stood out to me:

I loved its first line.

Here it is: “Retail food prices partially reflect farm-level commodity prices, but packaging, processing, transportation, and other marketing costs, along with competitive factors, have a greater role in determining prices on supermarket shelves and restaurant menus.”

Translation: Most of the money you pay for food doesn’t actually go to farmers or food producers.

Food is getting inflation blame because it did go up a lot the last couple of years.

“From 2018 to 2022, the all-food Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by a total of 20.4 percent — a higher increase than the all-items CPI, which grew 16.5 percent over the same time period.”

Translation: Food prices have gone up a lot, percentage-wise, but other prices also went up. Prices for items that cost a lot more than a dozen eggs currently costs also went up by nearly the same percentage as food.

We have no idea where our food dollar goes.

For every dollar Americans spent on food in 2022, 7.4 cents went to “farm production.” Another paltry 15.2 cents went to food processing.

Takeaway: For every dollar you spend on food, less than a quarter goes to the people growing it or processing it. The rest of the dollar goes to transportation, food services, energy, “finance,” and advertising.

Other things were a lot more expensive than food in 2022.

“Food prices grew 9.9 percent in 2022, slower than the 17.7 percent price increase for household energy and the 32.1 percent price increase for motor fuel.”

Takeaway: This one is pretty self-explanatory. You paid three times as much more, in 2022, to drive your car as you did to eat every single day.

You make more money? You’re not going to feel as pinched buying food.

“In 2022, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $5,090 on food (representing 31.2 percent of income), while households in the highest income quintile spent an average of $15,713 on food (representing 8.0 percent of income).”

Takeaway: I’m starting to figure out who and what I’m mad at.

Let’s set aside the fact, for now, that last fact, about how the highest income quintile in America spent only 8% of their income on all the food they consumed during the year, even though that really pisses me off.

Instead, let’s examine some numbers from other industries, namely, healthcare and housing.

I’m personally just back from a health screening test that used to cost me a $30 copay, and now costs me $350 (with excellent health insurance coverage, which I am lucky enough to have through my spouse), so yeah, let’s start with healthcare spending.

Let’s look at the National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA). These are estimates of total healthcare spending in the U.S., and have been tracked since 1960. Here’s what they’ve got to say about the last year or so:

“U.S. health care spending grew 2.7 percent in 2021, reaching $4.3 trillion or $12,914 per person. As a share of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, health spending accounted for 18.3 percent.”

We spent nearly $13,000 per person on health care in 2021. I don’t know about you, but that’s a sizeable chunk of my overall income.

According to nonprofit health research organization KFF, Americans ARE inreasingly feeling the pinch of high healthcare costs. In a recent survey, KFF found that nearly half of Americans say “they have difficulty affording healthcare costs”; among people with insurance, a third to 40% worry about being able to afford their monthly premium or being able to cover their deductible. Forty-one percent of Americans currently carry some kind of medical debt.

How has what we pay for medical services changed in the last fifty years? Here you go:

“On a per capita basis, health spending has increased in the last five decades, from $353 per person in 1970 to $12,914 in 2021. In constant 2021 dollars, the increase was from $1,951 in 1970 to $12,914 in 2021.”

For contrast? How has American spending on food evolved since 1970? Here you go:

‘In 2021, the average U.S. household food expenditure amounted to approximately 8,289 U.S. dollars.”

Meanwhile, spending on food in the early 1970s totaled $1,596 per household (or 19.3% of household income). In 2021 dollars (adjusted for inflation)? That’s $10,346.

That’s right. People spent more on food in the 1970s than they do now.

If only that was true about healthcare costs.

And then there’s housing.

Has anyone in the last couple of years not heard how insane the housing market is?

If you haven’t, here’s a number for you:

“Between 2017 and 2021, 31% of households spent 30% or more of their income on housing.” Also? A “quarter of renters reported spending more than half of their income on housing between 2017 and 2021.”

I’m not going to bother finding comparable numbers for housing costs through history. We know rent and mortgages are higher than they use to be, for a variety of reasons, many of which involve financial manipulation by wealthy people.

Yeah, I’m biased. I came from a farm and I know what’s involved in food production and processing, so I honestly think food is really, really cheap. Even when it’s more expensive, as it clearly has become the last couple of years.

But considering it’s something you need every day, and many Americans are getting more calories daily than they ever used to, it’s still distressingly cheap.

And I say “distressingly cheap” because, no matter how expensive you think food is now, it’s only going to get more expensive as farmers struggle with changes wrought on an overheating planet.

Why don’t more of us know this? Because food has been so artificially cheap for so long, we all just assume that’s the way it’s going to continue.

So, imagine you’re not in the top quintile of American earners. I’m guessing you’re not, because you’re reading and trying to learn. (In 2021, the average income for households in the top fifth of households in America was $269,356.)

Trust me, I live around a lot of people who ARE in the top quintile, and they’re not paying attention to anything except making sure their kids get all the tutoring and lessons and behind-the-scenes maneuvering they can hold to make sure they can follow in their parents’ high-earning career footsteps and STAY in the top quintile.

I really can’t blame them. But while they use up a shit-ton of resources, and underpay people to clean their homes, and order groceries and take-out for some underpaid hourly worker to deliver to their oversized houses, they are NOT NOTICING that ever-larger shares of all our spending will go to housing and healthcare and gas and yes, even food.

They are NOT NOTICING that the world is on fire.

They are NOT NOTICING that part of why they have a lot of money is because they’ve been ripping off farmers for cheap food for something like a century now.

And if you think they’re not noticing? The billionaires are certainly not noticing. Or, if they are, they’re just planning to go live in their bunkers.

Bunkers. Bunkers on a destroyed, decimated, burnt, world.

God, billionaires are dumb.

I really do fear that things are going to get worse before they get better.

Do you?

And yeah, obviously I know that our paying more for food, and a larger share of our income on our food, is not going to help any of our bottom lines.

But I don’t know any other way to make people in that top quintile (and billionaires, although I know billionaires are never going to notice anything) notice the cost their lifestyle is placing on their fellow citizens or on the world climate.

So my headline shouldn’t be “You’re Not Paying Enough for Food.” It should be “Rich People Need To Pay More For Their Food, So They Wise Up.” Maybe when they’re paying so much for their daily food that they can’t afford as many huge homes, large vehicles, and multiple vacations per year, they will slow down their consuming?

Yeah, I know. Probably not. But I’m running out of ideas.