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From the literal standpoint, unless you're ordering from super fancy joint (and probably getting a personal taxi for your food on top), no burrito should cost you 20. That's completely nonsense. I literally get 4 burritos for the family at 12 bucks at taco bell on the way home sometimes and if I cook my own it's even cheaper.
But lets take it more seriously as "food prices in general are high and I'm being hyperbolic in my complaint". Well, food prices are not that high historically compared to a share of income. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-family-disposable-income Even post 2020 is a pretty small blip on the chart compared to how much households were spending.
But fine, people are ahistorical and judging off their own perceptions rather than actual data and their own lived experience is food getting more expensive. Why is that? Well lots of it is that they're just eating out more, there was a massive spike in food consumed away from home and it now outspends food at home. This of course is more expensive, but also a choice. Or maybe food prices are just another proxy for the real financial strain in housing costs, and the pressure there bleeds over into their food budgets or something.
But honestly, I think all of this is also irrelevant. If you look at the replies of people who are pointing out that burritos are not 20 dollars, the complaints aren't "you're lying, a burrito is 20", it's "yeah but that's trash food and it's unhealthy". They're not saying it's 20 bucks at taco bell or at home, they're saying it's 20 bucks at their bougie MAHA/Gwyneth Paltrow approved entirely name brand products all organic no pesticides each cow got tucked in at bedtime by the farmer burrito joint. This what they consider the basic standard of food now and everything else is toxic non-food, plus of course the personal taxi for it, so no, a burrito does not cost less than 20 for them.
Don't think it's fair to compare a taco bell burrito and a Chipotle-style super burrito. Taco bell burritos can hit the spot but are undeniably cheaper in quality. Chipotle burritos use real meat chunks at least.
And taco bell packet sauces slathered on a bean burrito is always a 10% risk of painful, explosive, and watery poops IMHO. That organic wagyu burrito where the beef was hand-massaged daily is honestly way tastier and does not have the same risk of explosive poop.
Taco Bell is real meat, it's ground beef + seasonings + water + oil and then a little bit of things like thickeners and other binders. Is it the best cut of meat ever? No, but it's perfectly safe and edible. In fact it's more reliably safe than food was at pretty much any other point in history (even accounting for the recent outbreak, since having random infections and parasites was basically the norm for much of the past).
I've never had that issue once and I think it's either just a meme or serious lack of fiber in people's diets so they get hit with the 1-2 punch of grease + sudden fiber introduced.
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People think groceries are more expensive because Americans are increasingly switching to carts full of items that have always been more expensive- like yeah, steak prices went up, but Americans weren’t eating ribeye very often until pretty recently.
More broadly meat consumption in general is up massively, like 50% per person in the last 50 years.
Sure- that's generally true of societies with rising wealth. You see the same exact thing in Mexico, China, Japan, etc. US per capita protein consumption is perhaps rising because Americans believe they need to way overconsume(Americans ate far more balance meals with a lot more carbs in them in the nineties) protein while minimizing carbs(which are cheap). But rising food budgets in America specifically are probably much more driven by eating more expensive cuts rather than more meat per se; steak was considered a treat by most people when I was growing up, not something you ate every day.
I'm wondering if @loper's 50% figure is worldwide, since I'm not reading that for the US, but even the US stats I'm finding show a significant increase: over the last 60 years per-capita meat consumption is up by something like 25% if you include seafood or 20% if you don't, but we've shifted a bit away from increasingly-expensive beef and toward increasingly-affordable poultry. Within each category, could we be eating more expensive cuts overall? While it's possible to export or import more or less of different cuts, to a first-order approximation each cow we consume provides one cow's-worth of each cut of steak. It could be that we're trying to eat more expensive cuts, and thereby disproportionately bidding up prices there, but it looks like the opposite has happened: ground beef has become increasingly expensive this century, doubled in inflation-adjusted price over 25 years.
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Unless you are Methusala, this is patently false. Steak for Sunday has been my staple from 2005 through 2020, but after Covid lockdowns, I can't do it anymore. This has been broadly true for everything; I used to be able to afford a variety of nice deli meats to make sandwiches to take to work for lunch, now I buy the shittiest hamburger meat to make burritos with (the tortillas are kinda stale by the end of the second week, but them's the breaks). I didn't change, the prices did; good stuff is out of reach, switching to lower quality stuff has only somewhat aleviated the problem, and likely won't even manage to do that in a few years, even though I'm more financially successful than I've ever been.
You ate steak for a single meal a week for fifteen years? Totally disproves my point that expectations have risen in the general public.
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I wonder how much of this we can blame on college. 20 years ago, I could get a full meal plus a drink at the student center for under $5. A cheesesteak from a food truck was $3. Subsidized, obviously, but it's not like they tell you that.
Then you graduate and go back to the real world and watch that cheesesteak climb to $15 over a few decades and it feels like the world must have gone crazy.
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