How much do Americans spend on food?
Consumer spending behavior has changed a lot in the last 4 decades. Consumers are spending more and more on food either at home or out from home. This article visualizes the yearly consumer spending in the US for different food products over a period of the last 6 decades (1960–2020). These spendings are on eat-at-home products.
The dataset was gotten from The Bureau of Economic Analysis and the visualization was done with the Tableau software and can be viewed here.
Categories of Food Purchased
The visualizations above indicate that most consumers in the US purchased more meat and poultry products followed by cereals and bakery products.
According to Sentient Media, meat consumption in the U.S. is on the rise with an increase of about 40 percent since 1961. As of 2017, America had the second-highest meat consumption in the world, surpassed only by Hong Kong. This begs the question: how much meat do Americans eat, and what are the impacts of their meat consumption?
In 2017, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that Americans are exceeding the amount of meat recommended by national dietary guidelines, although women in the U.S. eat about a third less meat than men.
Sub-Categories
When these categories are broken down into their various sub-categories, we notice that the bakery products were the most purchased.
For the meat and poultry category, we see that beef is the most purchased followed by poultry and pork. However, when we compare the trend of these two over the years, we notice that from the early 1990s, the purchase of poultry products began to rise as shown below.
According to Sentient Media, the consumption of poultry has tripled since 1961. For the past decade, for instance, chicken has topped beef as the most-consumed meat. The growing popularity of chicken in the U.S. is linked to beef falling out of favor. For decades, consumers have been choosing chicken over beef due to health and environmental concerns. In 2014, Americans ate an average of 47.9 pounds of chicken a year (2.1 ounces a day), versus 39.4 pounds (1.7 ounces a day) of beef. While average chicken consumption has more than doubled since 1970, beef has fallen by more than a third. In 2020, the most consumed type of meat in the United States was broiler chicken, at about 96.4 pounds per capita.
TOTAL EXPENDITURE OVER THE YEARS
There has been a linear increase in food expenditure in the last 6 decades. One of the main reasons for the increase in expenditure is the rise in the population. As global population and rates of consumption increase there is a need to increase water, food, and energy supplies, but to do so in a sustainable manner to meet the needs of all people. Since the beginning of the 21st century, food prices in the U.S have risen between 2.0% and 3.0% a year on average. Grocery store prices have risen 2.0% while restaurant food has increased 2.8%.
The Balance Journal in a recent article highlighted short-term and long-term factors that tend to drive up food prices in America. The short-term factors include supply and demand, weather, disease outbreaks, war, and natural disasters while the long-term factors include high oil prices, climate change, government subsidies, and World Trade Organization limits on stockpiles. They argued that the U.S. government subsidies for corn production for biofuels have taken corn out of the food supply, thereby raising prices. The U.S. now uses 37% of its corn crop to make ethanol. That’s up from 6% in 2000.
Also, there was a spike in total expenditure from 2019 to 2020 as seen in the visual. This was the year of the worldwide Coronavirus pandemic that caused total lockdown in most countries. This expenditure increased many folds due to stay-at-home restrictions. During 2020 alone, the expenditure increased by about 25% compared to that of 2019. Let’s investigate the year 2020.
Panic Buying?
In 2020, there was a spike in total expenditure in March by about 24% from the previous month which reduced (about 13%) by the end of April. However, the total expenditure in April and all the months following were far above that of January and February. March 2020 was the peak of the Coronavirus pandemic and the total lockdown observed by many countries. It could explain why there was a spike in total expenditure in March: people were panic buying to stock up for the lockdown. This escalated demand for food-at-home. Exports and imports were disrupted as countries closed their borders to stop the spread of the virus. Food supply chains were constrained, leading to lower supply.
According to The Balance Journal, the COVID-19 pandemic sent food prices up by 3.3%. Most of this was driven by a 4.4% increase in meat, fish, poultry, and eggs. Dairy products, up 3.8%, were also a substantial contributor to the rise. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) predicts that food-at-home (grocery store) prices will increase 1%-2% in 2021. However, it expects that prices will return to normal after being inflated due to supply shortages during the pandemic.
What exactly were they buying?
From the diagram above we see that the most expenditure in March 2020 was on meat and poultry followed by cereals, baking products, and alcoholic beverages which can be classified generally as not-so-healthy foodstuff. This corroborates with the article released by Medical News Today on the health status of US citizens after the lockdown.
Researchers at Louisiana State University’s (LSU’s) Pennington Biomedical Research Center designed an innovative online global survey study to quantify changes in physical activity, sedentary behaviors, sleep, mental health, and dietary habits in adults aged 18 and older before and during the initial phase of the COVID-19 lockdown. The anonymous online survey, accessed through Facebook, the research center’s web page, and an email listserv, ran from April 3, 2020, to May 3, 2020. More than 12,000 individuals looked at the survey, with a total of 7,753 surveys included for analysis.
About 44% of the participants reported an increase in unhealthful snacking, while approximately 26% reported increased healthful snacking. The study reported that 36% of the individuals perceived declines in healthful eating, and 21% perceived increases. During the lockdown, weight gain occurred in 33% of the individuals with obesity compared with 25% of the participants with a healthy weight and 21% of those with overweight. This increase in unhealthful eating accompanied trouble falling asleep, decreased physical activity, increased sedentary habits, and nearly twice the reported anxiety levels than in those eating more healthfully.
Resources
https://www.coolgeography.co.uk/gcsen/CRM_Food_increasing_consumption.php
