Human progress is often incremental, but many positive trends have become clearly visible over time. One of these trends is the growing abundance of food. This series of articles looks at the affordability of food relative to wages in England between the 13th century and the present.

For this series, the average nominal hourly wage since 1260 came from the Bank of England’s Millennium of Macroeconomic Data. The UK Office of National Statistics collected nominal prices of milk, cheese, and butter since 1914. The price data for before 1914 is from professor Gregory Clark’s “The Price History of English Agriculture, 1209–1914.”

Figure 1: A continuous series of dairy product abundance

An hour’s work buys a lot more than it used to. For much of English history, the purchasing power of the average nominal wage remained relatively constant. There were some fluctuations, such as cheese becoming slightly more abundant in the 1400s. However, the purchasing power of nominal wages increased rapidly during the 20th century.

Figure 2: A continuous series of dairy product time prices

As we can see, at its peak, an English worker worked over 13 hours to afford a gallon of milk. That fell to just 14 minutes in 2022 (i.e., less than 2 percent of the previous time price). Next time you hear someone complaining about increasing food prices, think about just how affordable they are compared to the past. Food is much more affordable in terms of the one commodity that is truly scarce: our time.