Food

It recently came to my attention that the national average food-stamp recipient gets about $130 per month, per person for food. I thought this odd, since that's only a bit less than what Michelle and I spend on food per month together. Then I looked up how much the average American spends on food per month. I was astonished! The thrifty end of the scale was $366 for a family of two in 2010.

Now don't you say, "Yeah, Bret lives off of tacos and zucchini." That was in my bachelorhood, and left to my own devices, I probably averaged $30-40 per month. Now, I only occasionally eat tacos; I'm back to the regular PB&J for lunch. Plus Michelle made a delicious ricotta eggplant (hooray for Bountiful Baskets!) dish a while back, I make sushi, and so on. I feel that we eat well. My only guess is that we don't buy meat or snack foods. Not often anyway. And our breadmaker has produced some 250lbs of bread in the past year (that's 2-3 2lbs loaves per week). I'll probably get back on the oatmeal breakfast once it stops being so hot around here.

Now if the average meal weighs about 1lb, then we might be eating 180lbs of food per month. At $366 per month, that's about $2.03 per pound of food (or per meal, per person) vs our $0.78 per pound. According to this site, most items that cost more than $2 per pound are the meat and dairy products (plus potato chips). The cheapest items of July 2011 were, in order, flour, bananas, sugar, cabbage, rice, and potatoes. The most expensive were wine, sirloin steak, cheddar, coffee, potato chips, and ice cream.

Just food for thought.