Thankfully, We Don't Have To Spend As Much of Our Incomes on Food As Our Ancestors Did

Let's set aside the controversy over what Walmart's shrinkflation of its annual Thanksgiving feast bundle might suggest for the recent trajectory of grocery prices. The good news for which we can be thankful is that the share of their incomes that average Americans devote to paying for food has fallen steeply over the last 100 years.

This happy development stems from two long-term trends: rising incomes and falling food prices.

In 1929, Americans spent 23.4 percent of their after tax-personal disposable income buying food, reported the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2006. In 1929, food eaten at home accounted for 17 percent of food expenditures.

At the aggregate level, a crude calculation finds that in 1960, 11.4 percent of total GDP was spent on purchasing food for personal consumpt