The Average Cost of Food in the US | Hacker News Reader

The Average Cost of Food in the US

move.org

16 pointsShelnutt219 comments

What a terrible infographic. Light teal means least expensive states, and slightly darker teal means most expensive states.

I had to triple check the legend with the map and the price to make sure I had it right. It didn't need to be so bad.

The legend is also excessively confusing. Why not “10 least expensive states” and “10 most expensive,” rather than “Top 10 least expensive.”

I live in Burlington (#2 on the list).

Yes, we spend a lot on food but most of it is really high quality and from within 100 miles. The most convenient grocery in Burlington is City Market Co-op, which has the largest sales volume of any single-store food co-op in the country. That's probably skewing the data.

Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn claims the largest sales volume for a food co-op at over $50 million per year. It's impressive that Burlington's is in that same range, given the relative sizes of the populations served. The US needs a lot more of these.

Keep in mind this is based on individuals' food spending, not the overall cost of food.

Maybe Hawaii and Vermont, which are some of the healthiest states, look expensive because people there buy more fresh produce and organic food.

They only used data for the most populous city in each state. Weird.

Food in Hawaii is significantly more expensive than the rest of the US, and always has been, due to the shipping cost for all sorts of staple goods that aren’t produced in volume locally. Most famously, milk.

I don’t think “healthy eating” has explanatory power here.

Vermont's groceries aren't dirt-cheap, but they're cheaper than, say, Seattle.

Downtown Burlington's only grocery store is a natural-foods co-op, so maybe that skews the price data? Most of the mainstream, less-expensive grocery stores "in Burlington" are actually in South Burlington, which is a different city.

Houston (rather how nice of a place is to live) is probably one of the best kept secrets in the US. Despite some of the well-known shortcomings, mostly related to extreme weather events, for the most part is a kind, diverse, healthy and all in all super friendly place for new comers. Food is awesome and being lucky enough to have a good paying job, things like rent or groceries are incredibly affordable, esp. when comparing to neighboring cities (I’m personally in love with Austin but living there has plenty of issues too).

A bit outside Philly. Over the past several years, we've average $275-300 month per person for two adults. Another $100 month per person eating out. It's a bit tough to tell if they estimate buying a preselected set of food items? Do these costs reflect regional preferences at all?

>Do these costs reflect regional preferences at all?

Yes, they just used food spending data for the largest city in each state. No effort to standardize anything, as far as I can tell.

My wife and I spent multiple thousands on food (groceries + restaurants) in May, and managed to bring that down by about half (though still well over a thousand) in June.

We live in semi-rural Arkansas, so not a HCOL area by any means.

How do you spend so little?! Why would you? I grew up outside of Philly, so I happen to know a bit about your area, and it's much more urban than where I live now.

I live in Portland, Oregon, which has high COL and high food costs, and just checked my actuals (not estimates). Total spend for the last 2 months was $1263 for my wife and I. That’s $315.75 per month per person, and we buy a lot of organic food and produce. However due to Covid that was only including 1 restaurant meal both months, the rest was prepared at home. I think you are spending far too much on food, probably because of restaurants. Do you have something like Mint where you can see your spending by category and dig into this?

We are budget conscious but this is what our spending naturally settles into just going to to the store and getting the ingredients we need for the meals and snacks we want. Meat several times a week, lots of fruit and vegetables, some pasta and wraps and breads. We don't feel deprived or unhealthy, and it fits well within our means.

Yeah, I guess the main difference for us is cooking/preparing our own meals is genuinely foreign for us. My wife does try to learn, but for me I prefer to do nearly anything to cooking. At best it's a novelty, I've never looked at ingredients and thought practically about how I can make them pleasurably ingestible.

It's more expensive, but I see the cost as a price to free up my time/energy for other things I find more interesting.

To each their own!

We spend so much on food and likely half of it ends up in the garbage. Why are we so wasteful?

Any explanation for what's going on with New Hampshire?

I think it’s more expensive in Seattle because we have a lot of high quality food stores. Food in the us is too cheap, it should be more expensive everywhere

So much hate for this. I think people in the US don’t realize how cheap food is here compared to the rest of the world partially because we use unsustainable farming practices and because we tend to eat pretty unhealthy food.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com