Driving around on a tractor all day gives me a lot of time to think, and after a day of moldboard plowing and harrowing yesterday, the gears were definitely turning. My thinking got jump started by watching this movie about college students who live on 1$ a day in Guatemala for a few months. The poor of Guatemala spend a very large proportion of their income on food, and they still go hungry. It made me wonder what proportion of our income in the U.S. do we spend on food, and how has that changed over time. Luckily, there are lots of people who already done that work.
The source of this chart is here.
If you do a google search on the topic, you'll find other similar figures and raw data from USDA. In general, the data confirm my suspicion that the proportion of U.S. income spent on food has fallen considerably over time. Overall, we spend less than 10% of our income on food, and that percentage is the lowest or close to the lowest in the world.
To me, that brings up to potential conclusions: 1. Mechanization, subsidization, and, corporatization of food and farms in the U.S. had made food very cheap compared to historical standards, or 2: The U.S. is just really wealthy. It's probably a combination of the two, with other stuff that I didn't think about thrown in, but either way, it shows something that gets to the point of this post: We have disposable income that we could choose to spend on more expensive food. As a bonus, that food is probably going to be healthier for us, and reduce the amount of money we spend on health care. I figure that my household spends about 10% of it's income on food, which is higher than the national average, but smaller than the majority of the human population (of course, we also grow a lot of our own food which reduces our cost a bit).
If we want to ensure that small to medium scale farms are economically viable, we need to be ready to pay the food prices to support farming as a vocation.
If you do a google search on the topic, you'll find other similar figures and raw data from USDA. In general, the data confirm my suspicion that the proportion of U.S. income spent on food has fallen considerably over time. Overall, we spend less than 10% of our income on food, and that percentage is the lowest or close to the lowest in the world.
To me, that brings up to potential conclusions: 1. Mechanization, subsidization, and, corporatization of food and farms in the U.S. had made food very cheap compared to historical standards, or 2: The U.S. is just really wealthy. It's probably a combination of the two, with other stuff that I didn't think about thrown in, but either way, it shows something that gets to the point of this post: We have disposable income that we could choose to spend on more expensive food. As a bonus, that food is probably going to be healthier for us, and reduce the amount of money we spend on health care. I figure that my household spends about 10% of it's income on food, which is higher than the national average, but smaller than the majority of the human population (of course, we also grow a lot of our own food which reduces our cost a bit).
If we want to ensure that small to medium scale farms are economically viable, we need to be ready to pay the food prices to support farming as a vocation.
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