How America Spends Money: 100 Years in the Life of the Family Budget: This article examines the budget of the typical American family across three time periods: 1900, 1950, and 2003. What I find remarkable is the decline in the cost of food.
In the last 50 years, food and apparel’s share of family has fallen from 42% to 17% (and remember, we were near 60% in 1900) as we’ve found cheaper ways to eat and clothe ourselves. Food production got more efficient [...]
In 1900, food was 43% of the American families budget. in 2003, it was 13%.
We take so much for granted these days. In addition to being so much more expensive, food back then was bland and repetitive. You’d like eat the same meals 90% of the time. Variety was rare. Is it any wonder that spices drove world trade? We’d do anything to make food more palatable, I would guess.
One a side note that should have probably been explained is the transition in the 70s that was made to monocrop farming and extreme subsidies of commodities especially here in the US. That leads to everything being made out of corn and “variety” of the majority of your food now is really just different industrial mutations of corn.
In addition to that, most other commercial foods are either augmented with the help of science or just flat out created directly from cheap oil.
So the variety of food is really just of variety of creations interpreted as “food”.
“Modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food” – Albert Bartlett (1978)