The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [13]
Subsistence, I am happy to report, is not much of a problem for me these days either. I could probably subsist for a decade or more on the food energy I have thriftily wrapped around various parts of my body. And even in the past, when straitened circumstances forced me to live at the subsistence level regarding clothing, home appliances, and sports equipment, I have always been willing to devote more of my resources to food than have any of the people around me. I called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average American household spends $30,487 a year on everything, of which it allocates a pitiful 8.9 percent to food eaten at home and 5.4 percent to food eaten in restaurants. In telling contrast, I have spent between 30 and 100 percent of my income on food every year since I became an adult. Except for those few blissful days when I lived on the miraculous peanut-butter diet.
One day I nearly dropped a bowl of oyster stuffing when I read with disbelief and disappointment that the average American family spent only $2.59 a person on Thanksgiving dinner in 1991, down from $2.89 the year before, an undeniable sign of the decay of family and national values under two successive Republican administrations. To be precise, I did not actually read that the average American family spent only $2.59 a person on Thanksgiving dinner. That’s what the National Turkey Federation press release wanted me to think I had read. The press release really said that a complete Thanksgiving dinner for ten need cost only $2.59 a person, considering how inexpensive turkey is. They’re right about turkey. I called the Department of Agriculture. Turkey is the cheapest form of animal protein you can readily buy, or at least it was in June 1991. Three ounces of lean, cooked turkey flesh cost 42 cents; three ounces of cooked T-bone steak were $2.35. The protein in beans is much cheaper, but the USDA’s 1991 list of “meat alternatives” left out beans. Incredibly, no one in or out of the government knows how much the average American family did spend on its average Thanksgiving dinner. I called everybody.
The government does know that the average American household consists of one and six-tenths adults, seven-tenths of a child, and three-tenths of an elderly person (for a total of two and six-tenths humans), who collectively spend $4,271 a year on food, both in and out of the house. That comes to $4.50 a person a day, or $1.50 a meal. My disbelief at hearing these numbers cannot be entirely blamed on my own gluttonous nature. The French and the Japanese are happy to spend twice as much for their exquisite food. We, the richest country in the world, have simply chosen to scrimp. Among the wealthy countries, only the British spend much less than we do. This says volumes to me.
It seems obvious that the only way to spend as little as $4.50 a day on food is to eat nearly every meal at home. To test this proposition, I took out my 1993 edition of the Zagat New York City Restaurant Survey, checked off the ten cheapest restaurants, and began to eat my way through them. If you’ve never dined at the Wall Street branch of McDonald’s at 160 Broadway, just two blocks north of Trinity Church, you have a treat in store. It is a soaring two-story space with marble tables, an electronic stock ticker, a pianist at an ebony baby grand, a doorman, and a hostess in a curvy lavender suit. The back half of the ground floor is a traditional McDonald’s counter and kitchen, and the menu and prices are just what you would hope. Nonetheless, my discreetly spiced Mighty Wings, my order of excellent fries, and my Diet Coke totaled $5.34 with tax, effortlessly