Groceries vs. Dining Out

Bundle.com has a really interesting article about how much Americans spend on groceries versus eating out. According to Brian Wansink, the director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, we make 227 decisions about what to eat every day! (Except for days when you go to the Whole Foods café and are faced with 1 bajillion choices, only a few thousand of which are acceptable dino-chow.)

You can see in the chart above, Austin was at the top with a combined food cost of $12,447. I'm a little under that average, mostly because I only eat out in a restaurant about once a week. My grocery investment is around $6000 a year (!), but the restaurant total is only about $1800-2000 or so. Cooking at home definitely cuts down on the restaurant costs, but that grassfed, organic, high-quality food in CrossFit-worthy quantities doesn't come cheap!

Bundle's overall findings are pretty much what you might expect and again raise the troubling questions about lower-income earners' ability to buy healthy, quality food.

"None of this may be groundbreaking. But it affirms long-held suspicions: there's food at every price, for every budget, and what we spend on what we eat has a lot less to do with how hungry we are — or even what we may actually like to eat — than how much money we have."

Read the whole Bundle.com article here, and enlarge the graphic below to find your city to see how you compare with the average.

What are your grocery versus restaurant costs? Seems like if you're really committed to eating healthily, the in-home cost goes up, but restaurant splurges go down.