My current food expense are around $45/week for 3 weeks out of 4 in a month.
Once a month i do end up spending $40-$50 at a bar….
(which has more to do with social situation of sorts and is usualy my most expensive meal and has chicken wings or steak with alcohol, even there Jalepeno poppers are cheaper, popcorns are further cheaper)
O/W it would always be be in my regular range all month long.

Till last year I lived in Rhode Island and my pattern hasnt changed at all. I am not sure if you have
tried to optimize diets wrt multiple variables.

In case you are wondering my diet includes frozen vegetables, Fruits and canned and dried beans along with bread and some variable meat. Meat is the most expensive part by weight and even by calories that i buy every week.
I do take advantage of sales and coupons, and on ocaasion do hoard stuff(A desi habbit i guess…I have seen a few desis running back into shoprite to buy their grocerries in 2 lots to maximize coupons)
I found out making my lunch sandwitch with sliced meat was more expensive than peanut butter sandwithc, and switched to it 3 years ago. I switched to other brand of peanut butter when i learned of transfat.
1 boiled egg every morning along with some meat thats shredded in my dinner are the only poultry and meat in my regular diet.
I’d say the most expensive ingridient in my diet by volume and by calories are powdered spices, followed by meat,
and perhaps olive oil

And me eating this way has to do not with religion or anything but with eating economicaly and something that tastes ok to eat daily, and is “healthy enough”(O/w I would be eating bread with salt only.)

Even though I would love to bash Bush on this, he did do the right thing by vetoing the farm bill yesterday. Too bad it was filled with enough pork to override the veto today. Five more years of mind-boggling subsides ($280 billion over five years for those who might not have heard) without much to show for it except perhaps even more monopolistic behavior from agri-businesses.

Nobody said the rich need to eat less, but surely they don’t need to be subsidized to this extent, and to bring up population control misses the point even more. The rich countries should also be able to supply enough food to make ethanol without impacting world supplies, or do they not have economists and planners that can predict such things? The steady increase in demand since 2001 doesn’t explain the sharp increase price rise in the last couple of years. Maybe the declining dollar has something to do with it, but the ethanol mandate has just as much to do with it than anything else.

Some mention of this along with other reasons of increased demand might have made Bush’s statement defensible, but otherwise it is devoid of economic insight. Which makes me wonder (not the first time, admittedly) why I keep reading your blog.

I will clarify my statement that for an average family/person who buy groceries in a store, a meat-centric diet will be less expensive than a plant-centric diet. There may be exceptions to this based on where one lives (California will probably have fruits/veggies much cheaper than say, fruits/veggies in Maine; and cheaper than meat in California), and exceptions on comparing certain foods (apple vs. sandwich/baked goods – though that is not a valid comparison in terms of calories and nutrition, or a meal – “how many apples would one have to eat to get the same amount of calories as a sandwich?” would probably be a more valid comparison), or how healthy one wants to eat, but overall in the US, meat-centric diet is a lot cheaper (in terms of what one pays at the register). And subsidies play a big role in why it’s so, and the cost is definitely NOT reflected in it – lots of externalities associated with how it’s currently produced using CAFOs.

If you live in the US, you’re welcome to try this experiment – try living on a plant-based diet for one month, and then on a meat-based/centric diet for the next and compare which one is less or more expensive.

If you’re interested, Michael Pollan is one author who writes about the food issue in the US. The movie “King Corn” explores this issue in some detail.

That is not true.
Grain Breads and most vegetables and fruits are still cheaper than most meats.

But meat still cost more $/lbs than most grains, fruits and vegetables.
Of course berries cost more than most meat, but then i can compare salmon and swordfish prices to chicken….

Even at fast food places like Au bon pain where I often buy a fruit or two for snack, I pay $0.90 for an apple or a pear….
Which is still cheaper than sandwitches and baked stuff that they sell.

Even with the subsidy meat sells for more.
People eat it b/c they like it…The cost of production is still reflected in the price

All of agriculture in US is subsidized.
And its also in India.
India has less money and more farmers so its less subsidy per recepient.
There is a 3rd element too.
The %age of subsidy money that india looses to corruption and inefficiencies is higher than whats loss elsewhere(its not 0% anywhere)

One thing that indians should be seriously mulling is to divert more people out of farming into something more productive.

More productive people elsewhere means would result in more money to subsidize fewer farmers. It has a dual multiplier effect.

Regarding food prices its not the meat that has shot up this but its oil price increase which has to do with speculative trading.

Wrt US and regarding more people eating higher up the food chain, when government policies under pressure from agri-and-meat industries, make the cost of meat at the supermarket much cheaper than the cost of grains/fruits/vegetables, that’s bound to happen. One has to wonder why meat is cheaper when more resources go into making it and it is also much more polluting. Where are those externalities going, and who is paying for them eventually? If meat really factored in the true cost of production, I very much doubt that this trend would be on the rise. I wouldn’t just let this trend go unquestioned.

Besides, policies can be set that reward people for eating lower down the food chain, or at a minimum, factor in the externalities into the cost of buying higher-up-food-chain-food at the supermarket.