Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I completely agree. I generally know the prices of produce just because I grew up working at my family's farmstand, but even though I'm on a budget I definitely just buy the best quality of what I need. I don't think twenty cents less for most things is worth it. I generally know which items are really expensive (olive oil, certain cheeses) but if I buy them I prepare for the price because I really need them.

The only person I know who gets hung up on the specific prices of food is my grandfather - he used to go to three different stores comparing the prices of grapefruit (69 cents a pound versus 79) and complaining to the managers if they were more. But really, I think he just had too much time on his hands (plus he grew up in the Depression.)

I did notice the one day WF charged me $9 for three not very impressive grapefruits, so I guess I'm a little more choosy there. But in general, I don't notice the prices, I notice the quality, and I wouldn't buy something I didn't want for the difference of a dollar. You're not alone!!

Here is the thing - I have a photographic memory (which helped me very much during my uni years). Even though it's probably not what it used to be, I can still "see", say, a produce isle - and I will remember the order in which the produce is organised as well as the prices, even of things that I don't buy - I just remember.

Then, there is another thing - I may be somewhat of a...er... control freak? (my husband would tell you, OCD). I like knowing more or less how much I'm going to have to pay when I come to the cashier. I'm good with numbers, I don't need a calculator or even a conscious effort for it, it just happens. Now, I don't bother figuring out the exact amount, but I won't think that I need to pay $50, when my bill is $150.

So considering these two annoying traits of mine (although, really, photographic memory would suffice:-)), I do know prices.

I know the regular prices for my staples. Cora pepperoncini (big jar), Barilla pasta, tomatoes, 2lb bag of onions, several cheeses, etc. But I'm always surprised by the prices of things I rarely buy. BF picked up that "medium bag" of M&Ms the other day, and I just noticed that they were $4.59. That seems like an awful lot for M&Ms.

@embolini- my grandfather is the same way, but his main issue is with the price of tomatoes. He takes price increases in produce personally, and will refuse to buy the tomatoes after making his complaint. Still plays the lottery every day, though.

I guess I'm just a control freak because I know the prices of everything I put into my basket at the grocery store. And the prices are usually quite visible under almost everything in a grocery store, you just have to look!

@Embolini9 - WOW!! $3 for a grapfruit? I just bought a 10lb watermelon for $3...and they are on sale this week for $1.50 (can u tell I love watermelon).

I don't know what or how much things are going up. But, I have noticed a hike in prices. It's crazy, but it is what it is. I find myself asking when is it going to stop. And I just heard a new hike on Alcohol may be institued to my area. Just add it on.

As someone who grocery-shops for fun (or, finds grocery shopping fun), I always know how much things cost, and whether I can find something better or cheaper somewhere else. If I'm wandering the greenmarket and see a bundle of red kale for $1.50, I snap it up knowing that it would be twice as much in Whole Foods. And Milk Thistle Farm's excellent glass-bottle milk is $5 for a half gallon, which is about the same as the organic cartons in grocery stores.

My problem is that I practically lived in restaurants for most of my life (beginning at age 5, skip a few years for college, and until just recently). So, I was used to wholesale prices and just eating at my restaurant or other restaurants.

When I began entertaining at home, I never really thought about the cost of things, I bought what I needed or wanted. Leftovers? Give em away ot toss. That was the good old days.

Now, I buy what I need, when I need it, but I don't waste anything. Everything gets used...even if it's something as simple as tossing veggie scraps into a ziploc and then in the frezzer for future stock.

I think what's happened is a "perfect storm" of sorts. We are seeing rising food costs due to the rising fuel costs paired with the flooding in the midwest decimating our supply of grain and other products (on the heels of the drought from last year).

I hear the corn prices are getting so high that cattle are costing too much to feed so what we'll see is a glut of meat and lower meat costs in the short term, but after that meat prices are going to skyrocket.

I see shopping for bargains as a hit or miss proposition. I am in training to recognize a good price when I see it. I religiously comb through the flyers I recieve in the mail from my local grocery stores comparing sale prices for this and that. So I save a couple cents here and there, but blow it when I buy the raspberries for $4.99 when I can get them elsewhere for $2.99. That one purchase wiped out all my painstaking work on the other food items. Lately, going to the grocery store is akin to buying a new car - I always feel like I'm getting ripped off, but can't put my finger on exactly how LOL

If I need something, I need it. Well, if it suddenly cost $100 instead of a dollar, I'd be going without, but otherwise I buy what I need. I check prices among brands on the shelf, and depending on what it is, I may go for the cheap one or the pricy one.

Flour may have gone up, but a bag of flour is still a bargain when I think about how many loaves of bread I'm going to get from that bag.

With things I buy often or want to have "in stock" I might do some price checking, or I might buy sooner if I see a good sale. I've seen bags of flour anywhere from 89 cents to nearly $2 depending on brand and what sort of sales they're running. Sugar is the same way.

With meats, I always have something in the freezer, but I usually check to see what's on sale, and if it's something I use a lot of, I might stock up. I also might buy an indulgence item if it's a good sale.

As far as knowing exactly what everything costs -- no. Not to the penny. And particularly not the things that I seldom buy. But those are usually the ones I need for a recipe in the next few days. In that case, I'm not going to go hunting around to see if I can get it ten cents less at a different store.

@fatitalianbroad - Consider yourself lucky. Our lemons are 79 cents EACH!

I'm not on a budget, and don't mind paying for good quality ingredients. What really brought home the increase in food prices was paying over $400 for groceries for our Fathers' Day cookout for 40 people ... and that doesn't include $100 at the liquor store for beer & wine.
I hadn't planned the menu well, and was impulsive with some purchases. I know a good cook can create great dishes with basic ingredients, and had I planned better I would have bought cheaper (and more flavorful, but labor-intensive) cuts of meat. Putting out cole slaw (with that $0.69 cabbage!) and potato salad helped to stretch my buffet, and as usual there were plenty of left-overs. We had organic baby arugula at $3.00 for 6 ounces, too.
My grandmother used to say, "Better to pay the grocer than the doctor." As I said, I don't mind paying for quality, but the recent increase in prices has nothing to do with increased quality.

I have solid rules regarding the prices of certain foods: I will not pay more than 1.99 lb for top round london broil or boneless chicken breasts, $5.99 lb for rib eyes, salmon fillets or shrimp. If those items are not available to me at those prices I simply do without. The same applies to fresh produce: $1.99 lb for water logged, wilted romaine? $1.00 for a lemon???? No way!

I too do all of the grocery shopping for my husband & myself, and have noticed a slight increase in the cost of groceries. I also am a label reader & cost conscious shopper, although I love my high end groceries as well. I know the prices on everything I'm purchasing, and have been trying to stay within the weekly budget I've made for myself, since we've recently bought a house, and a new car.
I'm finding that to make up for the rising cost, I'm doing more myself. While in the past I would splurge & spend $5.99 on 8 oz of maple butter, I'm purchasing a less expensive butter, and flavoring it myself. I'm also making do with smaller cuts of meat, pieces of cheese...etc. I'm buying alot more things seasonally, and looking forward to harvesting more from my garden. So far this season I've been able to harvest leaf lettuce & strawberries from my garden. We also planted corn for the first time this year, and it's coming along nicely. I think these rising food costs are going to challenge all of us to get back to basics where food is concerned.

I became really interested in food politics because I have an obsessive need to understand things and the more I found out the more nonsense it seemed to involve. In fact, that's the reason I went vegetarian probably more than any though all the others sealed the deal.

There's a lot to it. The higher energy costs are a big part of it but then there's the Farm Bill from 1996 called Freedom to Farm which quickly was redubbed Freedom to Fail for several reasons and led to the direct subsidies to farmers as an emergency fix rather than price supports and floors. That was entrenched in the 2002 Farm Bill and what it did was allow commodities to be bought by big companies for much less than they cost to actually produce. This led to cheap (and low quality) meat and dairy and the switch to Confined Animal Feeding Operations because in part it was much less to buy the feed than grow it for your own animals not that those places are actually more cost efficient. We also ended up with a mass of junk. The 30,000 to 50,000 items on a modern grocery store are basically just a reformulation of the same 5 to 6 basic ingredients (corn and soy especially) along with some artificial flavorings and colors.

The 1996 bill also did away with reserves on the idea that a free market would regulate the prices and supply; except food is a bit different in that we will always absolutely need to eat every single day and it is subject to weather and more. So, when we have as we have with the many years of drought in Australia along with the rush to biofuels, an issue such as the floods in the Midwest are going to put a serious kink in the system. Iowa and Illinois usually produce one-third of all U.S. corn and soybeans. With reserves we could release those to stabilize the price and when the bounty returns we could fill back up to keep the prices from falling so low we lose farmers. We seem to feel we can conquer nature rather than understand and work with it.

There's a lot more to it including how the artificially low prices have caused the failure of farmers in other countries especially in Mexico and Haiti as some really visible examples. The United States exports 54 percent of the world's corn, 36 percent of its soybeans and 23 percent of its wheat. Our subsidized grains were sold for less than they could produce theirs even with the lower wage structures. Now it's really bad because those lands are not producing or even completely lost and those previous farmers are gone, part of the unemployed and starving.

Add to that, the big food manufacturers are able to leverage prices in stores to a very low percentage so the stores make up for that by forcing low returns to produce growers (if you have 10,000 pounds of peaches you take what you can get when you can as otherwise all you have is a lot of compost) and then the stores up those prices to make up for the low returns on the other items.

All this causes a rush to the least quality because of the force to do more with less.

North America though is quite spoiled by our bounty. We want only the best from the breast only of the chicken to just the very tops of the broccoli. 100 years ago all food was used (beet tops, broccoli leaves and stems, etc.) and what wasn't eaten by people went to the animals and compost (which grew more food). Now we waste up to half.

Gosh, sorry this is so long. I'm sure y'all already know about my issues with brevity. However, there's a lot more to it.

Personally what learning about it all did for me is that the money I saved on poor meat allowed me to give up the crazy ad chasing and coupon clipping (and losing) I used to do which saved me untold time, aggravation, and certainly gas money. I started buying more quality, local, seasonal, and organic and found I wasn't eating as much because I was satisfied yet I lost weight and became a lot healthier. And in the end I found I was actually spending less as it turns out there's a lot of illusion done with packaging. For instance just the other day I saw an ad for special tomatoes in a plastic cup (waste but branding) priced at 2 for $6. Thing is that the package was only 4 ounces so $12 a pound. Makes those flavorful greenhouse toms the little guy at the farmers market down the street sells for $4 a pound on a folding card table seem a heck of deal.

Anyway, yes I am indeed tuned into the prices among other things (lol) but for me I've found it's made me reconsider and find better ways to do things which it turns out is going back in time. I shop at a much smaller, locally owned store which supports local growers and turns out has a lot more choice (I went through a big store last night and there wasn't a thing there I'd buy anymore) and occasionally a co-op which is even more focused on local. I've started making my own beans, using those in all sorts of wonderful recipes and it's amazing all the wonderful things that can be done with winter squash. Just last night I discovered the joys of steel cut oats (wow!).

I also don't squirm much over the prices at the farmers market because those who grow are working very hard and for very little once it's all figured out.

@SSmom - I wasn't being critical, I was flabbergasted that you new what the cabbage cost!

I have determined I am a grocery shopping MORON. After reading these posts, I have made the decision to actually look at the shelf tags and not just the food item. It will be interesting to see what I choose not to buy.

*WARNING* - There is no guarantee that I will change a thing. I may not be able to help myself! ;-D

I absolutely know what things cost. I also know what I have to spend and try to make them match up fairly closely. I tend to try not to go into a store with a rigid list for everything (for some things, I have brands that I prefer and will get those when I need X). I look for fruit that's on sale, for example and will get blueberries instead of raspberries or whatever. The same holds true with fish and meat; I look for what seems of excellent quality and good value rather than going in looking for salmon, say, in particular.

Every so often my wife and I will want a very specific dish, in which case I'm likely to just go get what's necessary to make it; but I'll still know going in what it's likely to cost and we're willing to pay it.

Yes.....I do budget but I will not stop my self from eating well an whats good for my body an health.I do use coupons they help an I do stock up when there are sales..