The crunch for American shoppers pales compared with the challenges faced by those in the developing world. Americans spend just 9.9 percent of household income on food, according to the Agriculture Department. Compare that with poor countries such as Ethiopia and Bangladesh, where it's not uncommon for families to spend 70 percent. Diets also are more varied here: If the price of milk or flour jumps, shoppers can opt for other items. A typical poor family in Bangladesh, said John Hoddinott, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, gets 70 to 80 percent of its calories from basic staples, commodities whose prices have risen fastest.
"Internationally, it's appropriate to say the sky is falling," said Ephraim Leibtag, an economist with the Agriculture Department's Economic Research Service. "The average household is affected here, but it's not a dire situation."
Our consumer confidence is more likely to be affected by the perceived crisis in the mortage market, or th ever rising prices of gasoline. Still, add the rising food prices to that overall picture and it is enough to spook many consumer.
But think how many choices we may have in our response, choice not available to all Americans, and rarely options for those in the less developed countries where the impact of rising prices and decreasing availability of staples has been felt most heavily.
We can clip coupons, and choose to buy only those brands on sale, and/or for which we have coupons offering a significant discount. We can buy store brands. Having refrigerators and freezers we can buy larger amounts of what is on sale and not worry that it will spoil before we can use it. And if supermarket prices seem too high, there is the option of warehouse markets: Sam's Club, BJs, Costco (and I admit that I am a member of the latter and take advantage of the price savings in buying in larger packages for those things I already use, like cat litter, cat food, bread, and a variety of other items). We may have seen a 25% increase in what we spend each week/month over the past year, but think how much higher it could be without such options. And we further offset the increase in cost by doing as does this woman:
Other shoppers, like Kathleen Holly, are coping by visiting fewer stores and shopping closer to home. The Congress Heights senior said she hadn't yet made big changes to what she buys. Instead, she's conscious of "making a circle" when she gets in the car. "If I'm driving, I go to the bank, the grocery store, the cleaners all in one trip. That way, I can save money on gas and keep buying the things I'm buying."
Nielsen, which does marketing surveys other than what we watch on television, reported a while back that that there had been a drop of 9 percent in the average annual shopping trips per household, from 181 in 2001 to 164 in 2007. They reported that different households took different approaches, perhaps because for some big box stores are simply not convenient, and thus combining trips simply does not work. Nielsen noted
70 percent of consumers said they planned to try to combine errands to use less gas, while 27 percent said they planned to go to supercenters, such as Wal-Mart and Target, more often
Some go to discount stores that offer fewer items and less frills, a place like Aldi, new to the DC metro area, which is one of five different chains wher a woman named Pauline Adwutun now shops:
Unlike bigger grocery stores, which stock 25,000 to 100,000 items, Aldi carries just 1,300. The limited selection, along with Aldi's policies not to take credit cards and to charge for plastic or paper bags, helps keep costs down. Adutwun can easily rattle off the price differences between local stores: a loaf of white bread at Aldi costs 75 cents vs. $1.09 at Bottom Dollar across the street; conventional 2 percent milk, of which Adutwun buys about five gallons per week, costs $3.38 vs. $3.75. "I used to shop around. I'd go to Costco to buy the big packages of cereal, but now I mostly buy here," Adutwun said. "I can't afford to buy brands anymore."
Many of us also have the option of growing at least some of our food. I note that this suggestion was made numerous times in the threads of the previous diaries I have posted on this Washington Post series (and you can click on my user name if you need to go back and read any of those). Some also change how they use food - preparing soups and sandwiches that can be taken to work, or we can again become creative in using leftovers, something many of us who lived through the 50s perhaps remember as a regular part of our eating patterns.
Let me offer the final 3 brief paragraphs of today's article, before offering some more of my own commentary:
That there are myriad ways American consumers are making ends meet doesn't surprise Harry Balzer, vice president of NPD Group. Every generation, he said, spends a smaller percentage of its income on food than the one before. Today, the portion of income Americans spend on food is 58 percent lower than in 1929. "Everyone will find ways to moderate, to keep costs down," Balzer said. "There will not be a recession in eating."
But the long era of cheap food may be over. Global forces -- economic, agricultural, political -- have combined to create a new order that could prevent prices from dropping back, as they have in the past.
That troubles Pat Carroll, a retiree in Congress Heights: "I'm concerned, especially for families with children and for seniors. It's a problem for anyone on limited income. And I don't know anyone with unlimited income."
Yes, it is true that we spend a far smaller percentage of our overall income on food that was true before the Great Depression. Compared to most of the rest of the world, the proportion we do spend is miniscule. That gives us a degree of flexibility not available to most of the world, just like the choice among places to shop, and the wide variety of products from which we can choose is simply not available to most people. Their nations lack the transportion infrastructure that enables us to have such a wide variety of items, nor do they have ready access to refrigeration so basic an underpinning of our food system: imagine how our eating patterns would have to change absent ready access to refrigeration throughout the supply chain - and then remember the energy cost that represents and the impact that also has upon the availability and cost of food for much of the world.
For most Americans our experience with the the impact of the Global Food Crisis has been like that of the frog in the slowly heating water - it has not been severe enough to cause us to jump out. And perhaps for almost all who will read my words the imagery may seem unfair, even extreme, since we run little risk of the catastrophe facing so many around the world - we will not be scalded or burned by the increasing heat of rising food prices and scarcity of basic items, because we have flexibility in our budgets, we have options from which to choose, and we regularly see increases in our nominal incomes, even if for increasing numbers of Americans the nominal increase does not match the inflation of the cost we face, and we begin to slip further down the economic scale. Afer all, even if we get Cost of Living Adjustments, they are based on an index for which food costs are a relatively small proportion of the overall calculation. Through in the rise in fuels of all kinds and it still does not, on the average, have anything like the impact we encounter in the food portion of our household budgets.
So in a sense the wealth of America has kept us from recognizing the impact of what has been happening around the world. And given the socio-economic status of many, we may not recognize that for increasing numbers of Americans the impact is already becoming severe: people on fixed incomes are feeling the effects far more than a household like mine where both my wife and I earn comfortable incomes and thus have a large amount of discretion in how we spend what we earn.
There is another impact in the US not fully addressed by the article. Increasing numbers of American households are turning to food stamps in order to meet their needs, with some reports saying that around 10% of our households are now using the program: a recent NY Times article began like this:
Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s.
But in a time of rapidly rising food prices the amount currently budgeted for the program cannot come close to keeping up with the increased pressures for those already on the program, much less provide for the additional people being forced to apply for benefits as the increased prices push them beyond their ability to otherwise feed their families.
We are not in a crisis like the Great Depression, with "one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished" as FRD wrote in his second inaugural. We do not have the kinds of widespread malnutrition and poverty still so common at the time of documentaries such as "Harvest of Shame," which in my lifetime were able to shock the concience of the nation sufficiently that we created programs like food stamps. We provide some basic nutrition through things like school lunch programs.
In other words, we are not yet suffering as is much of the world. But unless we have the moral will to begin to act now, we will find we are not so immune from the challenges of what the Post has labeled the Global Food Crisis as we might believe. There will be Americans who suffer. And in a world as globally connected as that in which we now live we cannot remain isolated from the impact of that crisis elsewhere.
Today's is the last of the articles in this series. Given that I also wrote about food issues in my diary on Saturday, the day before the series began to appear, I have now written for six straight days on issues about the various aspects of the food crisis. Some of the diaries have gotten a great deal of attention, others have not. So be it. I can only hope that the Post series and my attempts to draw attention to it will at least cause some reflection and conversation. We should remember that the actions we take often have consequences we never see directly. As a teacher I am reminded of that constantly in every class that comes before me. And for me reading this series has meant that I have finally begun to apply that consciousness to other actions in my life - how I shop and eat, how I travel, how I heat and cool my house. Economic thinking became necessary because the world does not have unlimited amounts of all the items we need or to which we aspire. We inevitably have to make choices, and those choices have impact upon the choices that will be available to us in the future and to others whom we may never meet.
I thank you for being willing to read what I have offered. And I look forward to the discussion on this, hoping that I will learn as much from what you post as I have on the diaries posted earlier this week.
May we be able to walk joyfully across the Earth answering that of God in each man we encounter. May we learn together to use the blessings of this world wisely, so that all may prosper and none may want. May we learn the wisdom of using wisely and not destructively, beneficially and not selfishly. And whether or not we have children of our own, may we remember the importance, even in how and what we eat, of leaving the world a better place than it was when we first encountered it.
Peace.
