Grist Article - What U.S. citydwellers really spend on food and drink

By Bonnie Azab Powell
August 18, 2010

"Americans spend less per capita on food than any other industrialized nation -- slightly less than 10 percent of our annual incomes, according to figures oft-cited by Michael Pollan and others. Of that, we spend only 5.7 percent of our incomes on food consumed at home, USDA data reports -- the lowest rate of any country in the world, and that figure even includes money spent on alcohol and tobacco. That's not because we're cheap, exactly -- it's because U.S. food is artificially cheap, propped up by government subsidies and low-wage labor (or even slavery, as Grist's Tom Philpott has chronicled).But that's the national average, and residents of U.S. cities vary widely in their spending...."

http://www.grist.org/article/food-what-us-citydwellers-really-spend-on-food-and-drink/