Food Prices over 50 Years

It's the 50th anniversary of the Taste section of the Star Tribune, so this week they did a look back at all sorts of things. One was food prices, as seen in the grocery store ads of that first year, compared to now to the same products at Target. The differences are startling: some things are much cheaper (relative to the change in household income, which serves as a proxy for inflation or at least buying power), while others are wildly more expensive.

The Strib took their income figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, which recorded median household income as $8,389 in 1969 vs. $61,372 in 2017 (the most recent year available), a 631 percent increase. So anything that went up less than 631 percent is, in effect, cheaper than it was in 1969, and anything that went up more is more expensive:






The breakpoint among the products is around half way, with iceburg lettuce coming in just a bit above equal-real-cost-over-time. Three of the five products that are cheaper are relatively unprocessed (eggs, ground beef, and cream), while two are more so (cake mix and bologna). Of the six items that are significantly more expensive, only one is what I would call unprocessed (celery), while five are industrial foods (especially Crisco shortening, Wheaties, and Cool Whip). Campbell's Soup and Miracle Whip may not be as highly processed as those other three, but they're at least as processed as cake mix.

I'm surprised so many of these foods are so much more expensive, because I've heard for a long time that we in the U.S. are paying less for food now than we were in the 1960s. But when I went to look for a source on that, what I found is that we're paying a smaller percent of our income for food than we were in the 1960s, and that's because we have new expenses we didn't have then (especially health care and child care) and higher expenses in other areas (housing and higher education especially), so food as a percentage is lower. I couldn't find good stats on adjusted-dollar spending for food in my somewhat cursory search.

So these Taste section comparisons are a useful set of data points. Plus they have fun illustrations. Thanks, Star Tribune: happy anniversary!