“Food, glorious food
We’re anxious to try it
Three banquets a day, our favorite diet
Just picture a mammoth steak, fried, roasted or stewed
Oh, food, wonderful food, marvelous food, glorious food.”
– Lyrics from Oliver! (The Musical), John Powell & Lionel Bart
In a previous TOM blog, I revealed my love for words. I must come completely clean and confess that I have another passion with even greater intensity – food. My social media feed is full of food influencers posting new recipes. I regularly watch whatever Alton Brown posts on YouTube and devour everything I try out of my Milk Street cookbook. Sous-vide reverse-seared ribeye topped with blue cheese and grilled asparagus? Yes, please.
I’m not sure where this passion started, but there are two food memories that stand out. My first one is the initial encounter I had with a Reuben sandwich in grade school. It was nothing short of a revelation. The toasted pumpernickel-rye bread, melty Swiss cheese, sumptuous pastrami, creamy thousand island dressing, all offset by the sharp acidity of the sauerkraut… heaven. The complexity of these components coming together in perfect harmony was far beyond the reach of my second-grade vocabulary. I just knew this was something of a completely different order than a mayonnaise sandwich on Wonder bread with a side of SpaghettiOs and a swig of orange Tang, no chaser. I considered the neighbor who graciously made it to be some kind of wizard.
And then there was my first cinnamon roll with a tall glass of cold milk at Grandma’s house in Kansas City. I remember exactly where I was sitting at her kitchen table on a summer Saturday morning. It was not as gloriously complex as the Reuben, but the gooey gluten-bomb with brown sugar and cinnamon with frosty icing made its own impact. I was transfixed. How could a pack of baseball cards and bubble gum hold a candle to such delights? How many of these rolls are it okay to eat, and why had I not been introduced earlier to them?
Some people say they eat to live. Not me. I live to eat.
Now, maybe your relationship with food is not as love-infused as mine. But whether you have given it much thought or not, I maintain that what we eat and how we spend on what we eat reveals a lot about us and our priorities. What does our behavior reveal in the face of so much abundance? I think it’s worth spilling a little digital ink over, but I am going to refrain from offering specific financial advice. Instead, I’m going to serve up a plate full of food-based economic reflections to ponder and to talk about. Preferably over a good meal with friends.
The Food-Dollar Collapse
Did you know that food as a percentage of American household income used to be as high as 50% in the early 1900’s? This started dropping in the 1950’s to around 37%, and as of 2025, the number sits at 9.7%. That goes a long way towards explaining why my grandparents were loath to waste food. When half of every dollar you spend goes to simple sustenance, no crumb is taken for granted.
But it gets even more interesting. Some estimates show that 30-40% of global food produced is wasted before it even reaches the consumer. While there are still islands of food insecurity throughout the world, the macro story is one of massive abundance. If there was ever an argument for supply-side economics as a solution to lowering costs to consumers, this would be it.
Agricultural, transportation, and logistical advances have resulted in an abundance of food that is unmatched in human history. Even as beef and egg prices have spiked over recent years, this has not changed the macro-food landscape. We are virtually awash in food.
Questions to ponder/discuss:
- What % of your household budget is spent on food?
- Are your attitudes towards food waste different from those of your elders?
- What are the trade-offs for having relatively abundant, cheap food?
The Death of the Domestic Crucible
I’m not sure why I keep going back to my grandparents in this blog, but I’m doing it again. In my grandparents’ pre-WWII generation, eating out was a luxury. In fact, for every $4 spent on groceries, only $1 was spent eating out. By 2025, that number has completely inverted. If we put convenience foods and eating out in their own category, they now constitute $4 for every $1 spent on groceries.
The kitchen used to be a crucible of American culture. A hive of domestic activity that anchored our everyday lives. In 1910, members of the home spent an average of six hours per day in the kitchen. Today, we spend less than forty-five minutes a day in the kitchen. No doubt we can attribute some of this to technological advances, but the shift away from the kitchen is unmistakable. It is not the hub of the home it used to be. We didn’t just outsource meals – we outsourced a daily anchor of family life.
Our collective COVID moment saw an increase in buying food to make at home, but in 2015, there was a “Great Convergence” moment when eating away from home exceeded eating at home for the first time in U.S. history. By 2025, Americans will spend $1.4 trillion eating out and only $1.1 trillion on groceries to bring home. Eating out is no longer considered a luxury; it is a baseline behavior for most Americans.
Questions to ponder/discuss:
- What % of your meals are eaten outside of the home, or are convenience foods that do not require preparation?
- What have we lost/gained as a culture by eating fewer homemade meals?
- What have we done with the five hours we have gained outside of the kitchen?
Kitchens and Clinics
Yet another phenomenon is emergent – snacking culture. The traditional three-meals-per-day paradigm is passing away as we replace meals with snacks. In the 1970’s, about 71% of adults snacked on a daily basis. That number is now upwards of 97%! In fact, by some estimates, about 25% of our total caloric intake comes from snacks outside of meals.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that we are also consuming more food as a result. Total caloric consumption since the 1970’s has risen about 25% from 2000 to 2500 calories per day. Snacking and skipping meals haven’t translated to less eating – it is just different eating. And I’ll leave it to you to guess whether that has been good for our collective health.
Some are quick to point out that this inversion in food cost has been deleteriously offset by an inversion in household medical spending. Using our 100-year reference point as a relative comparison, consider that in 1925, medical spending was 3-4% of household budgets. Today, medical spending is upwards of 18-20% of household budgets. So, food costs have come down by 80%, and medical costs have risen by 500%. At minimum, it’s a relationship worth paying attention to.
I want to be careful not to make a strict causal connection between these things. There are many reasons medical costs have risen – from the dramatic rise of administrative costs, regulatory interference, our litigious culture, and people living longer lives. It would be simplistic in the extreme to attribute all of this to the economics of cheap food. But I think the cultural provocateurs raising the alarm may have a point worth wrestling with.
Questions to ponder/discuss:
- Do you still eat three meals a day, or do you replace meals with snacks?
- What percent of your caloric intake is attributable to snacks?
- Do you think there is a connection between the diets of cheap convenience foods and our national health-obesity epidemic?
The 32,000-Unit Illusion
I tend to be a grocery store perimeter-perishable food shopper. But that doesn’t mean I won’t wander the aisles with a gluttonous eye. On my last excursion through a big-box grocery store, I was blown away. Not just by the endless varieties of ketchup, salad dressing, chips, and of EVERYTHING, but of… Pop-Tarts. I thought Pop-Tarts would be pretty much maxed out at strawberry, chocolate, and blueberry. Boy, was I ever wrong. Now you can get Super Stuffed Molten Lava, Chocolate Chip Cookie-Dough, Hot Fudge Sundae, Girl Scout Coconut-caramel, and wait for it… “PROTEIN Boostin’ Brown Sugar Cinnamon” Pop-Tarts. Whoever came up with “PROTEIN Boostin’” deserves a raise. Genius.
Let’s take a bite of this protein angle for a moment. I lived through the low-fat / low-cholesterol era of the late 80’s and will never forget how that impacted what we saw on the shelves. And while I think that health fad was probably misguided, and I am all for more intentional dietary macro intakes… Wow. Protein Pop-Tarts were not on my bingo card. There are even sodas offering 30+ grams of protein in carbonated form.
On the one hand, all this abundance delights me because it shows how dynamic and robust our free-market system is. How could a panel of central-planning bureaucrats ever begin to dream of the variety that is available to us? But on the other hand, it is almost bewildering to navigate. At the advent of grocery stores in the mid-1900’s, a grocery store might have a few thousand SKUs (stock keeping units). By the 1980’s, this had risen to about 26,000 SKUs per store, and now it stands at about 32,000. Let that sink in. There are 32,000 things to choose from in your average grocery store.
I do not point any of this out to bemoan it. I point it out to observe a paradox. Our human nature can only process so much information. At some point, amidst the noise of 32,000 items, our choices function more like reactions than conscious decisions. If you hand me a menu the size of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” my decision fatigue may very well default to the burger, thank you very much.
Questions to ponder/discuss:
- Are you a perimeter-perishable shopper or an aisle shopper?
- How often do you try a new variety of old staples?
- Do you go to the store with a list, or do you just react to what you see?
- How likely are health-oriented messages to influence your purchase decisions?
Touching Grass at The Kitchen Table
I think that’s enough to chew on for now. And while I will stick to my promise not to offer advice, I want to suggest that our relationship with food is worthy of self-reflection. Not only because of what it may reveal about our spending habits, but because of what it may reveal about the rhythms of our lives.
A phrase that has been whacking me upside the head lately is, “Go touch grass.” In other words, put your screens down. Stop rushing around like a chicken with its head cut off. Maybe doing something more slowly, more deliberately – making your own cappuccino instead of having a barista do it… Inviting your kids to make cookies with you so they can lick the spoon like you once did… Doing the unglamorous sous-chef work of chopping veggies while you croon along with Sinatra…
Maybe we should be more thoughtful about how we buy, make and eat food. Because in our era of abundance, it isn’t just about sustenance. It’s about what we value and how we choose to spend not just our money, but our time. And in that sense, the economics of eating may tell us more about ourselves than we realize.
Cheers.
Brett Bonecutter
Private Wealth Advisor
