Why has your food bill gone up by more than £750 this year?

Question

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/15/nfood115.xml

Why has your food bill gone up so much?

What will you do about it?

Answer 1

I refuse to click on your link (no offense) but my food bill has gone up because oil prices have gone up so much.  I will pay more for food because starving to death doesn't sound like all that much fun.

Answer 2

hah thats awesome pounds you dont see that out here in america we have $ lol but yeahh prices are all increasing!!!!!!!

Answer 3

yes 10.000

Answer 4

Food prices are not effecting me too much either.  Since hubby and I grow as much of our own food as possible, purchase in bulk, AND do food storage, the prices have really not hit us.

Heck, the wheat I grind for our bread was put up in food storage in the 1970's, by my husband mother (yes, if stored properly wheat keeps that long).

Same with the sugar.  I'm working on a bag of 1976 sugar.  I have two more 1970's 25 pound bags of sugar to use up, then I'm into the 1980's for the sugar.  

We have white flour stored.  Purchased 50 pound sacks of it, when it was still just $5 a bag.  Last week the news said it's up to $40 a bag.

The one thing that is effecting us greatly is the price of hay.  We do not have enough land to raise all of our hay needs.  Hay went from $80 a ton last winter, to $200 a ton this winter!!

It was a shocking increase.  I raised the price of my goats from $75 a head, to $80 a head, because of the hay price increase.  My customers had a cow about the $5 increase, but I notice they are still coming to my farm.

Two of our dearest family friends (husband & wife) are teachers in the public school system.  The wife said they are having a lot more problems with students at school this year.  This is a very poor agricultural area.  The students are coming to school now without being fed breakfast.  It's very hard to teach children who have not eaten.  They cannot concintrate, and learn.  The parents are having to make choices of buying gas so they can go to work, and keeping the power on, or buying groceries, and feeding their children.  Ugly choices.  A lot of the children do not have winter coats, boots, and hats either.

I went through a period in my life when I first moved out at age 19 where I didn't have proper food.  I ate nothing but Cream of Wheat for three months once.  You could see every rib on my body, I was a walking skeleton.  

It's one of the things that drives me to being independant.  Raising our own food is one of the most important things my husband and I do for our independance.

~Garnet

Homesteading/Farming over 20 years

Answer 5

Well according to the article, "the increases are being driven by rising meat prices and global shortages in key crops, caused both by adverse weather and the demand created by China's rampant economic growth."

Since meat demand and prices are increasing the most (and livestock also contribute to global warming, which is causing problems for crops), the first step would be to decrease meat consumption.  We also need to address global warming so that we can avoid crop failures, which will cause food prices to increase further.

An obvious step would be for people to grow as much of their own food as possible (i.e. vegetable gardens and fruit trees).

Answer 6

This question only applies to those who are addicted to grocery stores and super markets .

Not to Home growers

One % rise in temperature means 10% crop loss,and parts of the world have had to contend with that,

Arable lands are lost to erosion and desertification,

Farmers sons are doing other things .

Transport cost are up

there is Water shortage ,or at least problems in many places

And unusual bad weather has destroyed many crops last year. many lowland arable lands became flooded due to super rain storms causing flash floods.

On top of that much food is now being grown for Ethanol instead of the table, this occupies lands that otherwise would have been growing food.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

And China due to big ecological problems in their North (the whole place is becoming a desert)are buying much more than before

To name but a few possible explanations.

And this is only a taste of what could be in store for us.

What can we do about it is become home growers

embrace the garden rake and

steal your neighbors leaves before he burns them.

get down and get your hands dirty

succumb to Permaculture,

Answer 7

No. My food bill has gone down. I am a Permaculturist, so I grow most of my own food. Each year I pay less for my food and get a better crop.

With the money I saved this year I am buying som Chickens.

My plan is to have chicken tractors between the fruit trees so that I can grow more perienial foods. Chickens will do all the hard work for me. A Chicken Tractor is a sectioned enclosure where the chickens can be moved or the sections can be moved. The Chickens scratch up the weeds, eat the pests, fertilize the soil and produce surplus eggs and meat.

Answer 8

AS the gas prices increase, the transportation costs go up. The food is transported to the stores. Thus cost of food has to go up.

Answer 9

There is not a lot we can do about it. I think a much larger issue is that the food price has risen for everybody including the 2.5 billion of the worlds poor that can barely afford a bowl of rice a day. Food shortages historically have always been followed by civil unrest.

  If you add to the equation the fact that weather patterns are changing so crop yields will be down, and the exploding population, AND the fuel increase things are looking gloomy.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/03de75c4-ac22-...

Answer 10

Fuel ethanol and biodiesel.  The effect of more and more farm land being converted to growing crops like corn, sugar cane, soybeans, rape, etc to provide mandated bio-fuel content echos throughout the food chain.  A classic example of the law of unitended consequences that always comes into play when governments try and force manipulate the markets.

Answer 11

No one seems to have mentioned the 20% loss in the wheat & corn crops last year due to extreme weather, so I'll mention it.

I accept I will have to pay more so I don't waste the food I buy.

Answer 12

I work at an farm dealership in ohio and i figure that the price of wheat is up because of the drought in austrialia the means there is no wheat there and the US farmer are exporting most of there wheat to other countries. the price of corn and soybeans are up because of ethanol and biodiesel research the price of fuel and transportation are up. and the weak american dollar i think has something to do with it but im not smart enough to explain it

Answer 13

I hadn't noticed that much of a rise in our food cost to be honest- and we are a low income family who watch the pennies. Plus I have a diabetic daughter and autistic son who both have specialist diets- so I cannot buy the cheapest option.

I feel buying in bulk often helps, and nearly everything I buy is in some sort of offer, buy one get one free....20p off etc

I hardly waste anything, and will prepare meals around food that has the shortest shelf life.

Sweets treats and extras are kept to a minimum.

meals are made from real food and I rarely buy processed.

Answer 14

Mostly that's due to the use of ethanol as fuel additives.  Since it's made from corn, it affects the price of all foods involved in the chain.

It takes 450 pounds of corn to produce the ethanol needed to fill one gas tank.  That's enough corn to feed a family for a year.

It also takes 1,700 gallons of water and a gallon of fuel to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. What a scam.  If it weren't being subsidized by congress it wouldn't make it on the free market.

This product is more expensive to transport, distill and it lowers gasoline mileage.  Also it turns out ethanol causes more pollution to produce and burn, but it's too late now.  The politicians are already behind this craze.

Expect gasoline & food prices to continue to rise.  Get used to it.  Any time we let global warming advocates and other environmentalist nuts control politicians we all have to pay in the end.

Answer 15

Inflation. Work longer hours or buy cheaper food.

Answer 16

As mentioned in the article: "Global warming also plays a part. The failure of Australia's wheat harvest last year was blamed on climate change and many big grain-producing areas of the world are predicted to become arid and unusable in the years ahead.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation said global prices would go on rising, and could be 20 per cent higher in 10 years."

Here's one description of the effect of climate change on wheat:

"A warmer Arctic will also affect weather patterns and thus food production around the world. Wheat farming in Kansas, for example, would be profoundly affected by the loss of ice cover in the Arctic. According to a NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies computer model, Kansas would be 4 degrees warmer in the winter without Arctic ice, which normally creates cold air masses that frequently slide southward into the United States. Warmer winters are bad news for wheat farmers, who need freezing temperatures to grow winter wheat. And in summer, warmer days would rob Kansas soil of 10 percent of its moisture, drying out valuable cropland."

http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/qthini...

A much more detailed analysis of the effects on agriculture, water supplies and qualiity, and electrical demand appears in this report to Congress:

The Potential Effects of Global Climate Change on the United States

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/effects...

"The effects of a warmer climate alone would generally reduce wheat and corn yields. Yield changes range from + 15 to -90%."

"Dryland farmers in the Great Plains are particularly vulnerable to climate variability. The Great Plains States of Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas were the hardest hit during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s (Worster, 1979; Hurt, 1981). Yields of wheat and corn dropped as much as 50% below normal, causing the failure of about 200,000 farms and migration of more than 300,000 people from the region."

For those of us the U.S. the plummet in the dollar and the rise in oil prices won't help (unless you work in the oil industry).