Justin Fox, Columnist

Nobody Cooks, and Maybe That's OK

The challenge is making prepared food healthier than it has been in the past.

November 23, 2016 at 7:07 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Even Thanksgiving can come in a box.
Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images

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The vast majority of Americans will be sitting down to a gigantic, mostly home-cooked meal this Thursday. So this seems like as good a time as any to point out that such meals have become an anomaly. Basic ingredients -- such as, you know, turkeys, cranberries and sweet potatoes -- now account for only 5 percent of U.S. food spending.

Basic ingredients also accounted for 5 percent of spending in 1999, so at least that's not on the decline. But according to the June 2016 U.S. Department of Agriculture report from which I got these numbers, prices rose faster from 1999 through 2010 for basic ingredients than for any of the other food categories -- so consumers were getting relatively less of them for the money. And I've got to think that, 50 or 100 years ago, basic ingredients made up a much higher share of food spending.