A little grocery rant…
This has been bugging me since yesterday. Last evening I went grocery shopping. Now my grocery shopping is pretty static unless there is an ungodly good sale on something. I spent a whopping $44, and walked away with nearly 25lbs of fruits and veggies, and…wait for it…nearly 3 pounds of meat, which accounted for $15 of the bill.
Normally, I would prep about 1.5lbs of these groceries a day for meals & whatever….so yes…give or take a couple days, this is nearly two weeks of food for me. It’s just bothering me that meat is sooo frickin pricey, and this wasn’t even the premium stuff, it was just sausage (which is like the cheapest meat you could ever buy). Maybe at some point I’ll take the drive out to one of the local suppliers and arrange a walkthrough to document the process.
We all know I am a far cry from a vegetarian. But I am pretty picky about my meats. I don’t like processed anything, and sausage is about the only “processed” anything I get nowadays, and thats only because I don’t have the room to make and store my own sausage (it isn’t hard or messy, just not feasible without significant cold storage).
So my question is…why is a meat product that probably costs less than $.50 to produce sold at $5.00 per pound?!
*ugh*
Katt Bruner liked this on Facebook.
The cost of food is not in its production, but in the packaging, transportation and retailing costs.
About .18 cents per dollar gets back to the food producer. Some miniscule amount gets paid to the migrant farm worker as well.. because buying a bushel of corn for $13.87 is better than buying one for $13.89 and since corn, like most all foodstuffs is a commodity, it doesn’t matter who you get it from, as long as its corn. So margins are so thin someone gets screwed… And that’s the little guy with no recourse.
The rest of that dollar goes to bastards. The kind of bastards that process food into junk and wrap it in shiny packages and preserve it on a shelf till a sucker gets hungry.
Once upon a time, there were farmers markets and co-ops. Those have been replaced with boutique versions that cater to feeding the rich, ratherthan feeding the poor. So they sell the same stuff for $7.00!
And that’s the story of why your meat is so expensive.