Look at the data, doom-and-gloomers — food costs aren’t what you think

Voters have a God-given right to complain. That’s why we have politics. 

It wouldn’t hurt, though, if we occasionally took a minute to place our problems in historical context.

Otherwise, we risk falling into a doom-and-gloom spiral that threatens to undo our grasp on reality. 

Take grocery prices.

Polls show that two-thirds of the American public consider groceries to be “unaffordable.”

The anxiety over prices is driving people to embrace socialist ideas like Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s $70 million city-owned supermarket chain.

And it’s the reason why many right-wing economic populists are pestering President Trump to stop fighting Iran so he can “focus” on lowering food prices.

Sorry, but they’re all wrong: We’re not living through an unprecedented food crisis.

In 1901, the average American family spent 42% of its disposable budget on food, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In 1945 it was 23%. In 1965 it was 15%. In 1985 it was around 12%.

Today, per Agriculture Department calculations, it’s 9.7%.

That number is driven by a historically high rate of dining out and having food delivered.

If we remove eating out from the equation and measure only grocery and supermarket shopping, the average family spends just 7.9% of its budget on food — and a discriminating shopper can probably do better.

None of this is even to mention that modern consumers have access to an amazing array of products and delicacies from around the globe that would have blown the minds of previous generations.

The American diet is the most diverse in the world, incorporating a wide variety of cuisines and year-round availability of products that were once seasonal.

Because of highly efficient global supply chains, a person can go to any big-box store in the nation and buy affordable produce from Central America, or beverages from Asia, or salmon from Scandinavia or curry from India.

Even with all this, Americans spend far less of their income on food than any people in any other nation on Earth, the USDA has found.

Yet most voters are apparently functioning under the mistaken notion that everything about our economy, particularly food costs, is getting exponentially worse.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the cost of food has risen at a slower pace than overall inflation and is now well within the normal pre-COVID range.

Even in the best of times, retail food prices rise between 2% and 3% year over year.

In 2025, overall food prices were up 3% — but only 2.4% in supermarkets and groceries.

Thus far this year, we’ve seen a 3% rise overall, with a 2.7% increase in home grocery prices.

We don’t need state-run supermarkets: Try brown-bagging it from time to time and you’ll save plenty.

It also seems that voters believe food prices have risen faster than their wages have.

For most people, that’s simply untrue.

Over the past decade, which includes the COVID pandemic, American wages rose over 46%, while food prices rose around 34%.

There’s no question that we’re still living with the inflationary domestic policy instituted by Washington during the pandemic, which affected nearly everything.

Inflation is cumulative, of course, and it’s unlikely we’re ever going to see prices roll back to pre-COVID levels.

Many recent hits on grocery bills, though, have little to do with government policy.

The outbreak of the avian flu spiked egg prices, for instance, and a long drought has boosted the cost of beef.

But there’s very little a president can do about such environmental impacts, or about normal levels of inflation.

Trump recently blasted Exxon and Chevron executives for making “too much money,” and demanded those companies lower gas prices.

The harangue was surely for voters’ benefit, since oil is a fungible commodity whose price is dictated by the world market and not CEOs. 

But the president can’t berate supermarkets — because while profits have fluctuated greatly in the fossil fuel industry, the grocery business is consistently one of the least lucrative in the country, with profit margins around 2%.

So far in 2026, supermarkets have seen a meager 1.32% net profit.

Grievance politics might be popular, but Big Grocery isn’t ripping you off.

Every generation lives in the context of its own experiences. I get it.

Still, for 300,000 years of human existence people were perpetually teetering on the edge of starvation.

Today, multi-billion-dollar industries exist for the sole purpose of helping us eat less.

So take a moment’s break from the intense pessimism of modern politics and appreciate the extraordinary truth: We’re living in an era of astonishing affordability and abundance. 

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. X: @davidharsanyi