It’s Time to Shelf the Myths About Food Prices
Measure the time needed to earn the money to pay for a meal. That’s what matters.
With one big family-gathering meal out of the way and more soon to come (Christmas? New Year’s? Super Bowl?), let’s talk about food prices and the “affordability crisis” much in the news and in politicians’ rhetoric. Judging from polls, many Americans believe that the grocery prices are slipping out of reach. Inflation since 2021 left a mark on household budgets, but step back from the checkout line and look at the longer record. Measured the way people experience prices — through hours of work — food at home has become more affordable, not less.
Start with the relationship that matters: wages versus prices. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics data on blue-collar pay and the consumer price index for “Food at Home,” we can compare wage growth with grocery inflation over multiple time horizons. Over the past year, blue-collar wages rose 3.8 percent while supermarket prices rose 2.7 percent. Over the past two years, wages increased 8.1 percent compared with a 4 percent rise for food. Over 10 years, wages rose 49.5 percent, prices 29.7 percent. Over 30 years, wages climbed 169 percent, prices 111 percent. Over 50 years, wages rose 558 percent, food prices 403 percent.
Put differently, wages grew about 40 percent faster than food prices over the past year, with often higher jumps in the other annual comparisons. The longer the period, the larger the cumulative advantage for workers.
The most useful way to express this advantage, as we argued in our 2022 book “Superabundance,” is not in dollars but in “time prices.” Americans buy goods with money, but pay for them with time. To calculate a time price, divide the dollar price of a good by the hourly wage. The result is the number of minutes a worker must spend on the job to earn that good.
Applying this measure to the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual survey of the ingredients for a Thanksgiving meal serving 10 people — or any other similar holiday feast or special occasion, for that matter — reveals fascinating information about basic “affordability.”
In dollar terms, the Farm Bureau basket rose from $28.74 in 1986 to $55.18 in 2025, a 92 percent increase; over the same period, the blue-collar hourly wage rose from $8.92 to $31.33, a gain of 251 percent. Once you convert those figures into time prices, an even more reassuring picture emerges. In 1986, a blue-collar worker had to work 3.22 hours to buy that dinner for 10. By 2025, the same meal required 1.76 hours. The time price fell 45.3 percent. For the time increment required to buy that meal in 1986, a worker can now buy 1.83 of them — nearly doubling what the labor will buy. Food abundance for that worker rose 83 percent.
This reflects a broader pattern. U.S. consumers spent about 17 percent of disposable personal income on food in 1960; by 2019, that share had fallen to 9.5 percent, driven largely by more affordable food at home. Even after the inflation spike in recent years, Americans last year devoted 10.4 percent of disposable income to food, still roughly half the share common in the mid-20th century and lower than in most other countries. That is a textbook case of Engel’s law: As incomes rise, the share of income spent on food declines.
What produced these gains is not mysterious. Better seeds, fertilizers, machinery, transport, refrigeration, packaging, inventory management and data systems all raise agricultural productivity. Competition in retailing and global trade further push producers to deliver more nutrition for each hour of work on the demand side. The result shows up not only in fuller supermarket shelves but in long-run trends in wages, prices and time prices.
None of that denies the pressure that higher rents, insurance premiums or interest rates place on families. Nor does it imply that every household shares equally in the gains. Time prices capture the average worker, not the person between jobs or outside the labor force. Policy debates about safety nets, housing supply or tax burdens remain important.
But when political candidates and commentators claim that food has never been less affordable, the evidence does not support them. In terms of hours of work, the typical American must sacrifice less time than earlier generations to put groceries on the table. That’s worth celebrating in the holiday season.
This article was originally published in the Washington Post on 12/2/2025.
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Inflation stats only measure the change in nominal prices over time, but what really matters is how those prices interact with incomes.
A price increase of 50 percent seems large, but if incomes rose 100 percent, prices actually fell.
This leaves aside the fact that, generally, quality also improves even as “time prices” fall.
That is progress, doing more with less, living better with less. We are all billionaires now!
The past year, the past two years, the past ten years — I think this sequence elides the source of people’s sentiment, which is the uptick in your graph right around the time of Covid. So I’d be curious to know what story the past five years time frame tells. The rampant inflation was such a shock that I think people still haven’t recovered.