Food is cheap in the United States. The percentage of U.S. disposable income spent on food prepared at home decreased, from 22% in 1950 to 7% in 2000, even if we add back the roughly 7% of our income that we spend on average on restaurant food in the US, we can see that the cost of food to us is relatively small.
For all of our food dollar, the farmer continues to get a smaller share as we buy our food more heavily processed. Even bread, which really hasn't changed in the past half century, has become notably more expensive compared to wheat. According to the census bureau a pound loaf cost between twenty and twenty-five cents in the sixties, while the farmer got about a buck sixty a bushel for wheat. Now the farmer gets about four dollars for a bushel (well below the inflation rate) while a pound of bread is generally two dollars or more. Corn prices have fared worse.
Meanwhile, sugar is so relatively expensive, compared with other sweeteners, that commercial businesses now do as much of their sweetening with high fructose corn syrup as they can. Still, it's no surprise that there are sugar farmers complaining about the price of sugar in the US, they just don't happen to be American sugar farmers.
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