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This year’s Thanksgiving feast will wallop the wallet

Caroline Hoffman, in her Chicago apartment on Oct. 24, says she is already stashing canned pumpkin when she finds it for under a dollar. Thanksgiving 2021 is shaping up to be the most expensive meal in the history of the holiday. / Photo by Anjali Pinto/The New York Times
Caroline Hoffman, in her Chicago apartment on Oct. 24, says she is already stashing canned pumpkin when she finds it for under a dollar. Thanksgiving 2021 is shaping up to be the most expensive meal in the history of the holiday. / Photo by Anjali Pinto/The New York Times Caroline Hoffman, in her Chicago apartment on Oct. 24, says she is already stashing canned pumpkin when she finds it for under a dollar. Thanksgiving 2021 is shaping up to be the most expensive meal in the history of the holiday. / Photo by Anjali Pinto/The New York Times

By Kim Severson / New York Times News Service 3 min read

Thanksgiving 2021 could be the most expensive meal in the history of the holiday.

Matthew McClure paid 20% more last month than he did last year for the 25 pasture-raised turkeys he plans to roast at the Hive, the Bentonville, Arkansas, restaurant where he is the executive chef. And Norman Brown, director of sweet-potato sales for Wada Farms in Raleigh, North Carolina, is paying truckers nearly twice as much as usual to haul the crop to other parts of the country.

“I never seen anything like it, and I’ve been running sweet potatoes for 38 or 39 years,” Brown said. “I don’t know what the answer is, but in the end it’s all going to get passed on to the consumer.”

Nearly every component of the traditional American Thanksgiving dinner, from the disposable aluminum turkey roasting pan to the coffee and pie, will cost more this year, according to agricultural economists, farmers and grocery executives.

photo Nearly every component of the traditional American Thanksgiving dinner will cost more this year, according to agricultural economists, farmers and grocery executives. / Photo by Anjali Pinto/The New York Times

There is no single culprit. The nation’s food supply has been battered by a knotted supply chain, high transportation expenses, labor shortages, trade policies and bad weather. Inflation is at play, too. In September, the Consumer Price Index for food was up 4.6% from a year ago. Prices for meat, poultry, fish and eggs soared 10.5%.

For many cooks, the biggest expense will be the turkey. By the end of the year, market analysts say, prices per pound will likely surpass the record Department of Agriculture benchmark price for turkeys – $1.36, set in 2015.

Turkey is more expensive largely because the price of corn, which most commercial turkeys feed on, more than doubled in some parts of the country from July 2020 to July 2021. Whole frozen birds between 8 and 16 pounds already cost 25 cents a pound more than they did a year ago, according to the weekly Department of Agriculture turkey report released Friday.

Packaged dinner rolls will be pricier because the cost of almost all of the ingredients that commercial bakers use has gone up. Canned cranberry sauce will cost more because domestic steel plants have yet to catch up after pandemic shutdowns, and China is limiting steel production to reduce carbon emissions. As a result, steel prices have remained more than 200% higher than they were before the pandemic.

photo Farmworkers harvest sweet potatoes at Kornegay Family Farms and Produce in Princeton, N.C., on Oct. 22, 2021. It will cost more this year to truck the crop to other parts of the country. / Photo by Madeline Gray/The New York Times