Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Costly Fruits and Vegetables?

One of the recurring themes of critics of the current food system is that calories are cheap, while fruits and vegetables are costly. I stumbled over this factoid from ERS while researching something else:

"How Much Do Americans Pay for Fruits and Vegetables?—One argument for not consuming fruits and vegetables is that they are too expensive, especially when fresh. Yet among 154 forms of fruits and vegetables priced using ACNeilsen Homescan data, more than half were estimated to cost 25 cents or less per serving. Consumers can meet the recommendation of three servings of fruits and four servings of vegetables daily for 64 cents. The related data product is a collection of spreadsheets that contain all the data used in the report and are presented to show exactly how ERS arrived at the costs per serving figures."

I didn't dig into it, but it's a reminder things are more complex than we imagine.

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