Damn, it's blocked at work.

I was surprised to see L.A. ranked so high. I thought no one ate there.

It was sobering see the economically depressed cities at the bottom. Detroit spends least of all and that makes me think there must be lots of Detroiters going hungry.

Swan, that was exactly my thought on seeing Detroit at the bottom. God bless 'em.

I also thought about making a pie chart on what we spend our food money on. We almost never go out (and I mean like we've eaten out twice in the last 8-10 months), but we buy fancy spices and masa flour and other foodie-like things. Wine, though, would be the largest percentage of any one category. Heh.

OK, now i can view it.

Going from Boston, where the average grocery bill is $343.16/month, we do pretty well. I try to keep the grocery bill averaging about $200/mo for the two of us. That is with locally raised meats, but we use meat very judiciously, and I cook almost everything else from scratch, or we'd never be able to do it. Processed and prepared food is expensive.

And the average for dining out is $329.41. We have hit that in some months but it makes me cringe - I try hard to keep it down around $200 also, though it's something we especially enjoy. I would like to save our dining out dollars for really good restaurant meals, but we always end up going to the pub or getting pizza about once a week, and it starts to add up.

We do spend a lot on wine and beer, but I track that separately. In the budget I break it down into "groceries" "alcohol" and "snacks" to keep track of what's really going where ("snacks" is like if I'm peckish at work in midmorning and I get a muffin - it's not really "dining out"). Dining out I track under "discretionary" which is a budget tip I picked up from someone on MeFi - maybe terrapin actually. Eating out is really more about entertainment than about food, and if you need to cut expense, it's a great place to cut - so I like not counting it in the food budget. If we ate out less we'd have to increase grocery budget, but by nowhere near the same proportion. $20 more in groceries buys a lot more food than $50 dining out.

...one of the toughest things of looking at budgets like Detroit's is realizing that even though people are spending much less out of pocket, what they do spend likely represents a much,much higher percentage of their income that has to go to food.

I'm smack in the middle of DC and Baltimore (on this graph and in real life). Interesting. (I don't track my eating out expenses since I pretty much never do that unless I'm on vacation.)

I spend about $1800 a year at the grocery store, but then that does include a number of non-food items like cat food, household products such as cleaning supplies, toilet paper and laundry detergent, and some basic personal care products like multi-vitamins, shampoo, deodorant, etc.

And that's for one person. Detroit's household average is so much less I find it upsetting to think about the realities behind the numbers.

I did like those Torchy's Tacos when I lived in Austin.