The rising cost of living.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that it seems to be targeting (or most negatively impacting, at any rate) the lower-middle class and those below the poverty line?

Example, we just did our weekly shopping, and the total was just shy of $200, for two people. And the closest we came to buying "junk food" was a couple boxes of popcorn for the month because they were on sale. I work part time and minimum wage, and that's like an entire paycheck.

It seems to be getting to the point where you have to be rich to live normally. Discuss.

Where the hell do you live? 2 person grocery bill in Southern Colorado is like 100 bucks for a week's meals.

We live in northwestern WA.

Chiming in from southeastern WA, a family of four can get two weeks' worth of food for >$400 Break that down, you get to Major Tom's $50 per person, per week for groceries.

EDIT: Less, actually, since it's usually closer to $350-$360, but I don't have accurate numbers on hand, so I rounded up.

edited 25th Jan '11 7:20:14 PM by Wanderhome

we just did our weekly shopping, and the total was just shy of $200, for two people.

The hell? We drop a hundred or so a week on five. Unless we get some of the sparser purchases.

for groceries one a month to once every two weeks, me and my mother - it ranged from 1-300 dollars per round. But there was 'junk food' in it. It was that good price range back a few years ago.

Think the current price is around the same.

(lives in Chicago proper in the south side, but then she'd go to suburbs for shopping from huge grocery stores [costco/walmart/cubfood/moonoink/jewel/ultrafoods etc etc])

Our weekly shopping typically comes out somewhere in the 100-200 dollar range. For five to seven people.

edited 25th Jan '11 8:20:00 PM by Aondeug

One thing is that if you're not paying attention your food bill can vary wildly from week to week, especially if you have a set shopping list. I find food prices on individual items swing much more than most (if not all) other products. Personally, I just buy whatever I like that's on sale, and it tends to save me a lot of money. (For example, last week I got what probably would have been a 150 dollar order for 60 or so, due to a massive sale the store was having)

Tip: if people want food prices to go down, we all need to eat less meat. It costs 10X the energy to produce.

^ If I want to raise a head's worth of cattle in Colorado all I have to have is a grass field and enough rain/rotation from the field to keep it growing and tall.

If I want to grow an acre of corn in Colorado, I have to dig irrigation, plant, keep monitored for pests (mainly grasshoppers), irrigate on a regular basis (even in monsoon season), and harvest. So long as I have a fenced field and grass I can rotate to, raising cattle is dirt easy here, it does not cost 10x the energy.

If I want to grow crops that are not drought and/or heat/cold resistant (which pretty much limits me to irrigated fields of things like wheat, corn, peppers, and melons) I have very limited terrain to do so in Colorado.

edited 26th Jan '11 7:35:22 AM by MajorTom

That's... a lot of money for a weekly shop.

I buy my food/things weekly; purchasing for myself, I spend between £20 and £30 a week. That's apparently between $30 and $50 a week. What are you buying that costs that much? Is the price of food that high in the US?

And bear in mind that I usually allow for a few luxuries in a week. If I really needed to I could shave down to £10-20 a week, and still eat fairly well (frankly, luxuries are usually the unhealthy stuff - biscuits/cookies, ice-cream, etc).

Its true that on certain terrain, its not economical to grow crops. Thats why hills tend to be sheep country. But biologically, every step up the food chain takes roughly 90% of the energy out of the system for each step you go up. Eat non-animal products, and thats two steps; 10% of the energy absorbed by the plants ends up in the human. Animal products? Thats sun to plant to animal to human; 1% of the original chemical energy stored by the plant.

In terms of how much you can actually grow, plants are far more efficient. Besides, aren't cattle often given feed, not merely grazed?

Yes, but that feed is usually stuff that's unfit for human consumption and things like the chaff from grains, that we can't eat anyways.

^^ Feedyard cattle and some of the plains locations are mainly because many places in Southern Colorado are barely a step above desert as far as plant life is concerned. The entire plateau region east of me and to the south of the Arkansas River is ill-suited to just raising cows via grazing.

But stuff near the mountains doesn't require feed, the mountain grasses at 6000-7000 feet elevation (many places at those altitudes aren't even inside mountain forest yet) are adequate provided you rotate to prevent overgrazing.

Hilly terrain in Colorado near the mountains at 6000-7500 feet depending on slope is better suited to things like apples provided you adhere to two caveats: Keep apple trees out of open grass terrain where they will burn to death in the summer (meaning keep closer to water), and keep them out of the dark timber on the mountain (the pine forests on the Wet Mountains forms a canopy that can heavily block sunlight away from apple and cherry trees, dark timber is where this canopy is oppressive to all plant life but stuff that can survive in lower direct light scenarios).

Sheep are usually raised on the scrubby grasslands along the Arkansas River.