By Monica Eng
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO – If you adjust for inflation and income, Americans have never spent less on food than they have in recent years. And yet many feel we’ve also never paid such a high price.
U.S. Department of Agriculture figures show the average American spent just 9.5 percent of his or her disposable income on food last year, a lower percentage than any country in the world.
And although meat consumption has risen slightly over the past 40 years, its impact on the pocketbook is less than half of what it was in 1970, falling from 4.1 percent to 1.6 in 2008.