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01 / 05
The Effect of Inflation on US Food Prices: 2019–2024

Blog Post | Food Prices

The Effect of Inflation on US Food Prices: 2019–2024

The recent inflationary period has eroded some of the gains made by blue-collar workers since 1919.

Summary: The long-term trend from 1919 to 2024 shows significant improvements in food abundance, with time prices for a basket of 42 food items falling dramatically. Unfortunately, the recent inflationary period has eroded a small portion of those gains.


Now that the US inflation rate seems to be heading toward the more usual 2 percent per year, it is perhaps the right time to look at the cumulative effect of the pandemic and the government’s fiscal and monetary responses to it on food prices. To provide the proper perspective on the evolution of food prices in the United States, we need to distinguish between nominal prices and time prices and long-term and short-term trends.

People often think that food prices are much higher than they really are. That’s because something can become more affordable even as its price rises. Our wages, which reflect workers’ increasing productivity, tend to grow faster than prices. So what matters is a change in price relative to a change in hourly wage, and time price (i.e., the nominal price divided by the nominal hourly wage) tells us how long we must work to earn enough money to buy something.

In our book Superabundance, Gale L. Pooley and I looked at the US food prices from the perspective of an average US blue-collar worker between 1919 and 2019. To be specific, we obtained 1919 nominal food prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and compared them to nominal prices as we found them on the Walmart website in 2019. We thought that a century of data would provide a good indication of rising living standards in America. We were not disappointed.

We found that that total time price of our basket of 42 food items fell from 27.26 hours of work in 1919 to 3.85 hours in 2019. For the same amount of work that allowed a blue-collar worker to purchase one basket of the 42 commodities in 1919, he or she could buy 11.73 baskets in 2019. Food abundance rose at a compound rate of 2.49 percent per year. At that rate, blue-collar workers saw their purchasing power double every 28 years.

That’s a lot of progress!

Recently, we have updated our data to 2024. This time, we compared the Bureau of Labor Statistics prices from 1919 to Walmart prices in Cincinnati—a city with the median cost of living in the United States. The good news is that the recent bout of higher-than-usual inflation (2021–2024) came nowhere close to expunging the gains made since 1919. Compared to our ancestors just over a century ago, today’s Americans enjoy a much greater abundance of food. On the downside, food is clearly less abundant than it was in 2019.

We found that the total time price of our basket of 42 food items fell from 27.26 hours of work in 1919 to 4.45 hours in 2024. For the same amount of work that allowed a blue-collar worker to purchase one basket of the 42 commodities in 1919, he or she could buy 9.45 baskets in 2024. Food abundance rose at a compound rate of 2.27 percent per year. At that rate, blue-collar workers saw their purchasing power double every 30.86 years.

In other words, because of inflation between 2019 and 2024, US blue-collar workers need to work an extra 36 minutes (3 hours 51 minutes versus 4 hours 27 minutes) to buy the same kind and quantity of foods that they bought in 2019. This 16 percent increase in time price of our basket of 42 food items is a sad reflection on the US government’s fiscal and monetary incontinence and the draconian policies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. As ever, inflation has raised prices for those Americans who could least afford it.

The figure shows that a blue-collar worker can afford several times as many of the given goods as they could in 1919 for the same amount of labor.

World Bank | Food Prices

Global Food Prices Ease amid Improved Supply and Trade

“Global grain supplies are projected to reach a record 3.6 billion tons in the 2025-26 season, marking a third consecutive year of growth—though at a slower pace than the average annual growth of the preceding two decades. Wheat supply has returned to its long-term average growth rate, while maize supply has rebounded after recent setbacks but remains below its historical trend. In contrast, supplies of rice and soybeans are projected to grow at about their long-term growth averages, building on last season’s significantly elevated levels.”

From World Bank.

Nature | Agriculture

England Poised to Green-Light Precision Breeding

“The UK government is close to approving rules for precision-bred plants in England. In May, Parliament published draft legislation that will enable a new regulatory system, as set out in the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023.

Precision breeding involves introducing genetic changes into the DNA of plants or animals using techniques such as gene editing. The new regulatory framework aims to introduce gene-edited plants with characteristics such as reduced need for pesticides and fertilizers, lower emissions, and reduced costs for farmers. Because the genetic changes are limited to what may have been obtained through traditional breeding, precision-bred crops pose no greater risk to health or the environment than traditionally bred crops. As such, the new regulatory framework will be distinct from that governing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which involve inserting foreign DNA into the genome.

If the draft is approved by both houses of Parliament, the rules will allow the commercial use of gene editing. It will enable plant scientists and breeders to develop varieties of crops with traits that confer resilience to climate change, disease resistance, or enhanced nutrition. Those crops might include oilseed crops enriched in ω-3 oils, non-browning potatoes to reduce food waste, tomatoes enriched with vitamin D3, and strawberry plants with five times the yield.”

From Nature.

The Verge | Food Production

Lab-Grown Salmon Gets FDA Approval

“The FDA has issued its first ever approval on a safety consultation for lab-grown fish. That makes Wildtype only the fourth company to get approval from the regulator to sell cell-cultivated animal products..

Wildtype salmon is now on the menu at Haitian restaurant Kann in Portland, Oregon, and the company has opened a waitlist for the next five restaurants to stock the fish. It joins Upside Foods and Good Meat, two companies with permission to sell cultivated chicken in the US, while Mission Barns has been cleared by the FDA but is awaiting USDA approval for its cultivated pork fat.”

From The Verge.

Curiosities | Agriculture

My Expensive, Exhausting, Happy Failed Attempt at Homesteading

“Everybody knows that drought is bad for growing things, but it wasn’t until last year that I learned heavy rain following drought is also bad, at least for tomatoes. The dry weather causes their skin to lose elasticity, and the sudden increase in moisture causes them to swell and burst. The fruit is still edible if you pick it fast enough, but a tomato becomes bug bait as soon as its insides are exposed. Crops don’t wait, and they often don’t keep.

This is one of the many lessons we’ve learned since leaving our concrete stamp in Philadelphia for three green acres in North Carolina in 2022. My wife and I initially relocated to be closer to family and because we wanted a yard where our kids could play. But as we acclimated to the greenery of the Piedmont, our appetites grew. We wanted more than a yard; we craved the full pastoral.

And so we bought a property with a large perennial pollinator garden, fruit trees, numerous trellises, a lengthy blueberry hedge, nine large raised beds and the pièce de résistance: a Lord & Burnham greenhouse built over the top of the walkout basement. We saw the house for the first time on a Wednesday. By Sunday, we were under contract and fantasizing about a homestead, where we would strive for self-sufficiency: growing and raising most of what we eat.

But three years later, most of the produce and all of the animal protein our family of five eats comes from Costco, Walmart or our local farmers market. Homesteading was simply not for us — though it did reinforce for me the miracle of modern agriculture.”

From Washington Post.