I ran across the Infographic below from the folks at BillShrink.com and wanted to share it with you.
We all know that food prices on many of our favorite items are rising, but did you know that the percent of household income that Americans spend on groceries has actually declined rather dramatically over the past five decades?
In the 1950’s Americans spent approximately 30% of their household budget on food. By the new millennium, it had shrunk to just 13%. However, don’t think that we’re eating better. Unfortunately, other data strongly indicates that what we are buying with our food budget tends to have much lower nutritional content per calorie than it did back in the 1950’s.
Source: BillShrink.com
Want to eat better? Stick to the outer ring of the grocery store. In general, produce, meats, dairy and other high nutrition items are on the outer ring of American grocery stores, with packaged goods and highly processed foods in the center aisle.
Wired Magazine published a great Infographic in 2007 that illustrated this in terms of “cost per calorie”.
Cost per calorie in your local grocery store aisles (click to enlarge):
Source: Wired.com
That’s a very interesting article. Thanks for posting it. I’m lucky because I live in an area that has lots of little corner stores with lots of organic fruits and vegetables, a few butcher shops, and really good bakeries. I do 90% of my shopping at the little corner stores, and only get big things at the supermarket, toilet paper, etc. I also have a small refrigerator, so bulk shopping is not a good idea for me. With that said, I hate to throw away food, so we have leftovers, and I use everything – even onion skins and celery bottoms are saved to make stock.