Are food prices rising?

the beer revolu

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118627778#Comment_118627778

This is pretty much my view, as well.

When I see some of the price rises being highlighted, I'm shocked at how cheap both the old and new prices are. I, also, accept that price increases on cheaper food items affect lower income households disproportionally.

But food has been really cheap for a long time, now.

Feisar

I've noticed the creep upwards. I dont scrutinize my receipt but I'll glance over it. We shop in Aldi for the bulk of our food and it is going up. But realistically it amounts to a take out coffee or two a week. Much more important is food management at home.

Muahahaha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118627851#Comment_118627851

How or what happened that fertiliser tripled in price?

Danzy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118632636#Comment_118632636

Gas prices surge. China limiting exports til Jun and a few other things but they are the big ones.

greasepalm

Need to keep receipts as buying the same things you can see the price changes and i noticed SuperValu delivery has gone from 5 to 7 euros now and lost the free delivery if receipt was of a set price.

Pistachios & cream

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118628949#Comment_118628949

Groceries really have been cheap for a long time. I remember shopping with my mother in the early 90s and her shopping was always around £100. This was for a big family but it was a pretty rigid list with little variety and leftovers were incorporated into meals the next day. We only got exotic fruit and grapes when they were on huge sale. Cereal was always corn flakes and wheatabix. Now we ate very well with loads of baked goods as treats and biscuits etc but it was all managed I can see now quite tightly by my mother.

nowadsys in my own shopping I have so much more variety and what would have been considered luxury foods. However there’s no way I spend as much as my mother did even allowing for family size.

zell12

Lidl pasta was 45c last summer, now 65c https://www.lidl.ie/p/inflation-busters/spaghetti/p18839

Muahahaha

Lidl frozen chicken wings have gone from 2.79 about 4/5 months ago to 3.29 today, there has been two price increases as I remember buying them at 2.99 about 6 weeks back

lenscap

Yes prices are creeping up but I think cooking from scratch and good food management will help.

So ditch the sauce jars and packets and don't buy pre-prepared meat/meals.

I checked a supermarket's whole raw chicken, €2.60 per Kg. They had prepared raw chicken fillets, €8.30 per Kg. That is more than 3 times the price per Kg.

Cooking from scratch doesn't have to be so time-consuming and cooking can be fun/enjoyable rather than a chore.

Black Sheep

Completely agree on cooking from scratch, it can be long and leisurely or brief and time efficient… But it is less expensive for certain.

The challenge is many people have little or no cooking skills. I don’t mean that in a judgemental way, I was like that until I met my wife and discovered how important cooking was to her. I didn’t know even the most basic of techniques.

I’m reminded of a Jamie Oliver show where he tried to teach cooking to a few working class families who were only eating takeaways and processed foods. Initially he thought previous generations in their families knew how to cook and that the current generation were an anomaly. But historians he had on were able to show that (in the UK at least), urban dwellers always depended more on convenience type options as much or more than home cooking, ever since the industrial revolution.

As time passes I feel like the class divide is getting more and more acute when it comes to the related areas of cooking ability and health (particularly obesity). It’s not just a money and time gap, it’s a knowledge and lifestyle gap also.

lenscap

Speaking of Jamie Oliver, he had a tv program a few years ago about school dinners and part of it was a classroom of English children about 8 or 9 years old and a classroom of Italian children the same age.

He showed a selection of vegetables to the English children and about half or less could name all. Whereas all of the Italian children could name all the veg.

In Italy, there is pride in cooking knowledge and skill, both male and female and it is not seen as a chore. It is simply a case of attitude.

I often thought that simple cooking skills should be taught in primary school. It is a life skill after all and we do eat 3 times a day so it would come in handy😁.

I remember one time on Operation Transformation (I think it was) and one participant was shocked "What??? We have to cook EVERY DAY!!!"

Muahahaha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118670499#Comment_118670499

yeah the mark up on stuff that is processed can be colossal. The best Ive spotted yet is Aldi who sell tiny packets (50 grams I think) of cooked streaky bacon. It is listed on the price label at 25.99 a kilo which is insane given you can buy a packet of it uncooked for 1.09

Danzy

Food prices have been slipping for years, especially for producers, people wanted it cheap.

That model is now falling apart.

Dial Hard

Jack Monroe (@bootstrapcook on Twitter) is a brilliant follow if you're interested in how inflation affects food prices at a far higher rate than the published percentage. She's in the UK but much of it is relevant here too. She's also very vocal about how rising food prices disproportionately affect those on lower incomes, having been on the absolute breadline (no pun intended) herself for many years.

TheKBizzle

+1 for @bootstrapcook she recently took uk supermarkets to task on the disappearance of lower priced items and had a lot of them successfully reappear on shelves. She has a blog too with loads of money saving recipes.

Black Sheep

TBH the classic Delia, Marcella Hazan, Diana Henry etc recipes are probably as cheap as what Jack Monroe plans, if you adjust the protein source used (if there is one). Not a dig at her, just an observation that a lot of good fundamental cooking is not inherently expensive, it’s mostly about technique and patience. Inevitably if you are on a budget you might have to cut corners on ingredient quality but a roast chicken will still be pretty good whether it’s a basic Lidl one or a free range one that was massaged and fed grapes by a man playing a soothing flute to it. Shame to lose out on supporting higher welfare but needs must at times.

zell12

Tesco frozen chicken burgers have gone from €2.49 -> €2.59 -> €2.70 in two months

Seeded burger buns were 69c now 85c

the beer revolu

I bought two ribeye steaks in Tesco the other day for €9.50. They were seriously good steaks. Stand out good.

If I think back to 20+ years ago - you just couldn't get decent steaks in the supermarket. If you wanted decent steak you had to source from a good butcher and I remember, distinctly, paying £5 (not €) per similar sized striploin steak.

So, what I can now buy for for €4.75 would have cost €6.35 over 20 years ago.

Food has gotten extremely cheap over the last 20 years - no question.

I accept that this is little consolation to anyone genuinely struggling to put food on the table.

Gant21

Gone are the days of yellow pack Tesco food. The modern generation are clueless.

The Nal

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118555198#Comment_118555198

Takeway from that. Cook more from scratch. Its never been cheaper.

Spuds down, veg down, kilo of rice for 99c, kilo of carrots for 99c, 2 kilos of flour for €1.85, 2kg of spuds for €2,

Muahahaha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118718903#Comment_118718903

There was also the period during the recession when Aldi/Lidl were selling decent rib eye steaks on their Super 6 meats for 2 euro each, iirc that was their cheapest ever. Looking back they must have been using them as a loss leader to drive footfall in the door. They often had ads matching them with red wines so probably made up for it that way and people buying other items.

Since then the grading of their cheapest rib eyes seems to have gone down a bit while the price went up and while theyre still ok they are not as good as they once were. Youve to go for the premium ones to get something really nice.

zom

"Gone are the days of yellow pack Tesco food. The modern generation are clueless."

And they will stay cluesless - their parents (who mostly know yellow packs) will eat wood chips just to make their offspring happy and not whinging in Social Media. It is not what you can afford, but how much vocal you are in demanding..

patnor1011

Not to be pessimistic but did you notice how our masters went from casually mentioning food prices and availability in the times to come to almost daily reminding people about what we should expect?

Pretty serious times are ahead since what we eat today is mostly from last year harvest. A lot of stuff will not be planted this year and yields will go down rather significantly due to fuel and fertilizer shortages. Coupled with export bans it is hard to predict what or how we will be eating by the end of this year and the next one. Current generation which do not plan further than to next day shopping is not capable to understand this. Not only that, a lot of the people are not able to even try to build up some reserves of the most basic stuff due to putting preferences on booking some nice holiday for this summer.

Black Sheep

There was a price correction in our food prices coming in any case, which would have accelerated due to climate in the years ahead. The war is going to exponentially ratchet that up.

No one is going to starve in Ireland, but the reality is that yes, food prices are going to see further significant rises and it's going to the same elsewhere in Europe. It'll be interesting to see what major interventions the State makes in all of this, but there seems little doubt we're going to see the sort of large scale moves that we saw made during Covid also, when they're necessary. Things that were once off the table are likely to come on the table again quickly, such as fracking in the U.K.

Recently in the public arena we have seen the re-opening of debates about Irish defence policy. I think that actually that debate needs to be put behind a debate about what it will take to make us food and energy secure. The three areas are related, of course, but food and energy are two that we can address easier than defence.

patnor1011

I do not know why people still feel somehow optimistic. Food price correction due to climate?

I am sorry but "no one is going to starve in Ireland" is strange statement mainly due to fact that there are already people who do not get enough food. The only intervention state will be doing is that they will introduce food vouchers like Macron is thinking of doing that in France. There already are protests in several EU states because of rising food and energy costs.

I do have feeling that most of the people underestimate the situation due to lets say lack of experience.

We used to buy chicken fillets 25 in a tray for 23 euro. When it went to 25 we thought its OK prices mostly go up.

They were 30 this Saturday and Monday when butcher opened they were 34.

Black Sheep

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118820463#Comment_118820463

That's very interesting. Please, share your experience with us!

How soon do you think we will see deaths by starvation in Ireland related to these price increases?

tabby aspreme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118820463#Comment_118820463

Chicken and pork/bacon products will probably have the greatest price increases and may become scarce, as pig and poultry production are entirely dependant on cereals

the beer revolu

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118829249#Comment_118829249

And chicken and pork have both been outragously cheap for decades - as evidenced buy people routinely being able to afford to buy only chicken breasts and eschewing the rest of the animal.

Imagine if most people only bought fillet steak and no other cuts of beef!

patnor1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118829114#Comment_118829114

Starvation is not the only thing which may happen to people who would not be able to afford food due to rising prices and lack of supply. It is rather complex like even now we see obesity and resulting severe health complications simply because people on low income can not afford to finance balanced diet and end up eating cheap processed junk food.

But if we go back to food scarcity which is coming no matter what you think then people again will go for cheapest stuff and result will be malnutrition.

We already see deaths caused by bad diet and malnutrition. This may be more common by the end of this year and the next. Now we still eat last year harvest while this year's one and the next do not look very exciting due to current situation.

patnor1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118829249#Comment_118829249

I understand. My example was only to illustrate that shortages did not even started yet and prices are already exploding.

A lot of basic staple stuff went up 20% and more in less than a month.