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kent's avatar

In the article, it is mentioned that 12.5% of adults responded they did not have enough to eat in the past week alone. A few sentences later, 6.7% of household income is spent on groceries. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around these two percentages as they don't appear to be congruent.

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Jadrian Wooten's avatar

Low income households may spend a higher percentage of their monthly income on rent, which leaves less money (in absolute terms) to spend on food even if the percentage spent is similar to other, high income households.

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kent's avatar

Interesting, I found this which I thought was eye-opening. Just a different persepctive. Living in Argentina, I can certainly relate to a lot that was discussed in this article. The pinch on the lower classes is real! "As their incomes rise, U.S. households spend more money on food but it represents a smaller share of their income. In 2022, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $5,090 on food (representing 31.2 percent of income), while households in the highest income quintile spent an average of $15,713 on food (representing 8.0 percent of income)." from https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20households%20in%20the,representing%208.0%20percent%20of%20income).

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Jadrian Wooten's avatar

A lot of the international data in the original article came from Our World in Data, which has a nice summary of this relationship: https://ourworldindata.org/engels-law-food-spending.

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