We came across these interesting stats the other day. In America in 1900 food made up 43% of a family budget. Housing 23%. In the 1950s the figure was 30% food and 28% housing. In 2003 housing had risen to 33% and food just 13%. Yet more food is eaten! Granted, it’s American but I believe if I could find the data, the statistics would be very similar here in Australia because of our high cost of housing and the discount wars conducted by the supermarkets. theatlantic/business/archive/2012/04/how-america-spends-money-100-years-in-the-life-of-the-family-budget/255475/ Then I was chatting to a farmer the other day about the actual cost of producing food. We talked about the expectations for food to be cheap, so cheap in many instances that it is sold below the cost of production. We agreed that producing high quality food sustainably, both financially and environmentally, was impossible if you also wanted the food to be cheap. We also came to the conclusion a farmer can produce cheap food and still make a profit…as long as they had enough short cuts in production and distribution to make it cheap. For example; if you use feedlots for cattle to fatten them on grain, or massive sheds of tightly packed chickens fed gmo pellets you can produce cheap food profitably. However, real food which is environmentally sustainable and good for you because it is raised naturally, will cost more…but is it expensive given food is now a much smaller percentage of our household budget than it used to be? Maybe natural food still costs the same to produce as it always has. Maybe our expectations have changed because we’ve been factory farming now for more than 60 years? Maybe housing is actually expensive? We’d love to know what you think.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 22:57:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015