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The online discourse, I've been watching this week is the $20 Burrito. As a super TLDR; this is an intra-right argument that got started by one conservative saying young conservatives are upset about food affordability, and gave an offhand example about '$20 burritos'. The response was a combination of:
Burritos aren't actually that unaffordable, the rate of increase in unaffordability has come down, also you can make them at home for cheaper, also you aren't entitled to eating out.
The response to the response is that this is a losing message to one's own side, avoids accountability for losing focus on why 2024 went Trump, and suspiciously aligned to Iran war support.
Before I address that specifically, a little about my personal burrito.
I am as close to a controlled middleclass experiment as possible.
I live in the same zipcode I grew up in; my kids go to the same Catholic school I went to. I work in the same industry as my father. I aspire to give my family the same life I grew up with. I can't live the life my parents lived.
In the 90s my parents moved us into a new construction. Today, I live in smaller a house, on a smaller lot built in the mid-70s. In realtive terms, I live in a house that is not only smaller, but nearly 50 years older than the one my father did.
My parents had >8 kids. I have 5.
Here's the kicker: My father was an individual contributor, software developer. I am a Director-level at a mid-market software company; This isn't title inflation, I manage an org of about 25, including multiple layers of leadership.
While being considerably more successful than my father in my career, I financially struggle to same life he lived.
I don't disagree with any of the above points, or probably other reasonable ones, but they all miss the point: I want to live the life I grew up in, I am willing to work hard for it, I held up my part of the implied social contract, I think that the failure of the implied social contract is a BAD thing, something to be seen as regrettable, and I want my politicians to focus on fixing it.
Burritos aren't actually that unaffordable, the rate of increase in unaffordability has come down, also you can make them at home for cheaper, also you aren't entitled to eating out.
This is all arguably true. But yet, is a losing message. Especially when your side won on addressing the real and percieved reasons we can't get affordable burritos, and super especially when the other side's solution is 'free burritos for our friends, mass immigration for our enemies'
The US middle class opportunity has changed in negatives ways for reasons that don't benefit me, and I didn't ask for, and instead of my political side agreeing to help address these issues, they are telling me to support a foreign war
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.
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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