Cost of Living: Food Knowing what percentage of our cost of living is spent on food is always a good thing to know. We recently published an article by Lynn Carpenter on her Cost of Living- Real Basket of Goods in it she compares the cost of several ordinary food items over the decades. Her weekend meal basket included "one loaf of bread, one pound of coffee, one dozen eggs, three pounds of mid-price beef, one box of Corn Flakes or Cheerios, five pounds of potatoes and one Hershey bar." In this article she determined that over the years a minimum wage earner would have to work 9.25 hours in 1938 to buy this food. But by 1961 a minimum wage earner only had to work 3.75 hours to buy the same … [Read more...]