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A restaurant riddle: food for thought. 26 July 2007 11:59 am

Posted by Tracy in : convenience,news,restaurants , trackback

The fine folks at Kitchen Garden International recently called my attention to an interesting statistical fact: 2005 marked the first time that U.S. consumers spent more on foods consumed outside the home than foods prepared at home, for the first time since the USDA started tracking such data in 1953. Here’s a shiny graph about it, again courtesy KGI:

(click on the picture to go to the KGI blog post about this story) and the raw data can be found here. My riddle for you is: have a look at that raw data page and tell me if the USDA did any kind of correcting for the fact that food eaten away from home is expensive. It’s not hard to spend more on a meal eaten out than you would preparing something similar at home: just consider the price of bottled water or restaurant coffee versus home-brewed. I’m not at all sure how I’d adjust the data to reflect the difference in prices, so I’m really not sure how I’d go about proving that people bought more food prepared outside the home than in. Readers, what do you think?

  • http://www.victorhansonsmith.com Victor

    I think a better metric would be: “meals prepared/consumed at home versus meals prepared/consumed out-of-home.” Forget about the money.

  • http://www.tracyfood.com Tracy

    But then I have to define meals! What about snacks? Where do I count “free” coffee at work? Going out for drinks but not getting any food to go with them?

    And besides, I still want to know about the money because I’m very interested in comparing and contrasting time spent versus money spent — and not just on food. Also I’m not sure what to do about the fact that so many foods blur the line between prepared at home and prepared out-of-home, like pasta sauce from a jar or whatever, even the canned tomatoes used to make homemade pasta sauce if you’re feeling very fussy.

    Yes, I am a colossal nerd.