Abdominal number crunching

In preparation to meet Wayne the financial planner, I've crunched my monthly credit card spending.

Those numbers are boring, but I discovered we spend $11.54 per person a day to eat. Of our monthly average food spending, 29.1 per cent is eating out. Now is that totally outrageous? We don't have two other mouths to feed (althought Daorcey's like 1.5 mouths). To the Internet, I went.

Comparing us to 2001 figures at Statistics Canada here, the average Canadian spent 30 per cent of the food budget eating out. Hooray for being average.

As for overall food costs, I went to another Stats Can page, located here. The weekly Canadian spending for food in 2001 was $123.76, which averages to $17.68. Going to the Canadian inflation calculator, that $123.76 in 2001 costs $139.03 in 2006 dollars. The average daily cost to eat in 2006 was $19.86. So we are only spending 58.1 per cent of the average Canadian.

For comparison I found this page from the US Department of Agriculture; Americans in 2002 spent $6.15 ($7.29 CAD) a day on food, of which 43 per cent of that is eating out. Converting using the American inflation calcualtor and some fancy math, they are spending in 2006 $6.89 USD ($8.16 CAD) a day on food.

According to the World Food Program, "The average daily expenditure on food in the developed world is US$10 ($11.84 CAD)."

Basically, we spend about the same as most people in the world .

But you know what that $11.54 really means? I never go hungry. I eat three nutritious meals every day. I know my fridge is always full.

According to the World Food Program Hunger Facts page
-852 million people in the world do not have enough to eat;
-815 million in developing countries--mostly those in sub-Saharan Africa do not have enough to eat;
-hunger and poverty claim 25,000 lives every day; and
-every five seconds a child dies because she or he is hungry.

I didn't intend for this post to finish where it did. But if you feel the way I do, you can make a donation to the UN World Food Program here.