Prices Versus Other Factors
Prices Versus Other External Factors
Survey of Brooklyn College Students: “How much money did you spend on food during common hours today?”
In this survey we asked thrity people on Tuesday November 2nd, 2010, “How much money did you spend on food during common hours today?” around 1:15 pm after common hours. The average money spent by each of these students was 5.03 dollars. Around Brooklyn campus the most popular food items in the 4 -6 range is a gyro or sandwiches usually from Burger King or McDonalds. In addition there the two people that spent 1 dollar so far said they were not hungry but suggested they were going to probably buy something later in the day. Since our sample is relatively small compared to the population of Brooklyn College students our data may fail to give us a good conclusion. However, our data seems to fit the standard bell curve distribution relatively well and has no extreme outliers.
How much are you willingly to spend on a full meal for lunch?
We also asked the same people “How much are you willing to spend on a full meal for lunch?” This includes a drink, meal and possibly a snack. We found the average amount that each student was willingly to spend was $ 7.40. The graph shows that the average amount that each student was willingly to spend is well over $5.03. The difference between the amount spent and the amount students were willing to spend is most likely due to the busy schedule of college/school scenery. It is likely that an average student does not eat a full meal when he or she does not have sufficient time for a buying a full meal.
Bring it all together: When we look back to the first graph we see that about 19 people spent under the concluded average amount a student is willing to spend for lunch ($7.40), during common hours. As result we can conclude that time and food costs are very influential factors that students acknowledge when choosing what to eat. When we compare these findings with the food prices we conclude that places like Applebee’s are not usually considered, on a daily basis, as because of expense and a tight time schedule enforced by school. We observed that students were more likely to buy from places that offered delivery and takeout because students want to save as much time possible for schoolwork; this is not environmentally sustainable due to wrappers and plastic containers. However, there is one main thing that one should keep in mind while analyzing this survey, the social aspect of food. The more socially sustainable food is usually comes at the expense of economic sustainability thus depending on the ideals and attitudes of the people being surveyed the the averages we calculated maybe inflated or deflated. For instances such as eating Kosher vs eating non Kosher. According to the food prices we see that eating Kosher is more expensive then not eating Kosher.
Food Miles and Costs
Many people fail to see the underlying complications that are tied to the sustainability of food. The food industry is not only about consumption but also depends the transportation, processing, and preservation of food. Transportation is vital to the food industry. Without proper and efficient transportation systems food is unable to effectively reach designated areas; this is one of the main causes of world hunger the inability to deliver food in a timely and cost efficient manner. In additon an efficient transport system is critically important to efficient agricultural marketing. If transport services are of poor quality or expensive then farmers will rise prices of their crops and food. This is largely due to the resources required for such a large scale food transporting system such as has an adverse effect on environmental sustainability because the main source of energy for transportation is fossil fuels; Fossil Fuel is a natural resource that is formed through the decomposition of buried organisms. There are many types of fossil fuels that we use today to power our industrial needs. Examples of external environmental costs are the increased amount of fossil fuel used to transport food long distances, and the increase in greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the burning of these fuels.
Mack Truck
The main method of transporting and distributing food throughout the United States uses trucks with a refrigeration apparatus that also use fossil fuels, to deliver food. If the trip usually takes longer then a days worth of driving, the food would usually be shipped by plane due to cost efficiency. However it turns out that all of the food places that provided us with the information of where they get there is under a days worth of driving. The longest being from Intelligentsia Direct Trade in Chicago, IL to Brooklyn College, which takes approximately 13 hours of continuous driving. The average food factory delivery truck usually comes from the world’s leading manufacture of delivery trucks, Mack Trucks. The most fuel modern fuel-efficient Mack delivery truck currently has about 11 miles per gallon. http://www.macktrucks.com/#/home
So assuming that all the food factories that have this new Mack Truck that usually prices around $55,000 dollars and that the trucks have only the designation of Brooklyn College with no stop, the number of gallon of gasoline needed travel to from each food factory to each specified food places around Brooklyn College is as listed:
*Brooklyn College Coffee-
Their coffee comes from:
Intelligentsia Direct Trade in Chicago, IL… 717 miles
Frequency: 2/year
Gallons of gas: 65.18 gallons per 6 months
Cost of gas: $195.8 per trip
*White Castle-
Their food comes from:
Columbus, OH… 480 miles
Frequency: 1/week
Gallons of gas: 43.63 gallon per week
Cost of gas: $131.06 per trip
*Kosher Haven (in Brooklyn College Cafeteria)-
The ingredients to make their food comes from:
Jetro’s in Brooklyn, NY… 3.4 miles
Frequency: 2/week
Gallons of gas: .618 gallons per week
Cost of gas: $1.85 per week
*Subway’s-
Their food comes from:
U.S. Foods in Perth Amboy, NJ… 18 miles
Frequency: 2/week
Gallons of gas: 3.27 per week
Cost of gas: $9.82 per week
*Pizza Hut (in Target)-
Their food comes from:
McLane Foods in Guilderland Center, NY… 143 miles
Frequency: 2/week
Gallons of gas: 26 gallons per week
Cost of gas: $78.1 per week
*Frozen foods sold at Target-
Their food comes from:
A&L Foods in Baltimore, MD… 170 miles
Frequency: 2/week
Gallons of gas: 30.9 gallons per week
Cost of gas: $92.82 per week
****The price of gasoline, in NY, is currently 3.004 USA dollars per gallon (regular grade). As of 11/8/10
However these calculations assume that these trucks are solely just delivering food for the indicated individual branches. In reality these truck can hold up to several tons of weight usually 4 -6 tons. As one can expect this extra weight consumes extra gas in order to be delivered over several states and multiple stops.
Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/petroleum/data_publications/wrgp/mogas_home_page.html
Why do we care?
Transportation, processing, and preservation of food are all external costs for the corporations and because their main goal is in order to maximize and maintain profit it is clear that food prices will reflect these external cost. One many argue that the price change of lets say coffee will only increase only by a few cents if gasoline prices were to increase by a reasonable amount and it would barely change the cost of coffee for an individual per year. Though this maybe true, that scenario is only in the perspective of coffee costs. Gasoline prices is one of the main sources of energy for all household utilities such as gas, creating a water pressure in a household and electricity and is also responsible for powering food transportation. If we were to add these few cents to all the resources that we use to prepare and obtain food our annual costs on food would see significant changes.
Take a look at these figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:
• At the beginning of 2002, an average household spent $59 a week for food at home and $25 for gas.
• As of May 2008, an average household spent $72 a week for food at home and $83 for gas.
WEEKLY COSTS for FOOD, GAS
……………………………………………………………………{Jan-02 Jan-06 May-08}
Food at Home $59 $63 $72
Food away from Home $43 $51 $52
Gasoline $25 $39 $83
YEARLY COSTS for FOOD, GAS
……………………………………………………………………………………………..{Jan-02 Jan-06 May-08}
Food at Home $3,086 $3,297 $3,743
Food away from Home $2,235 $2,634 $2,235
Gasoline $1,279 $2,013 $4,295
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2008 Consumer Price Index (http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpid0805.pdf)
And Consumer Expenditure Survey 2000-2006 (ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/y0006/multiyr.txt)
According to the U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics gasoline consumption by households did not increase over the past few years. But we increasing gas price we see the increase in food expenses. These differences in costs are in the hundreds and this is only in the view of food. If we were to expand the our research to other resources not only pertaining to food we would see that gasoline affects our yearly costs much more significantly than we are lead to believe. According to the Huffington Post “Wholesale prices raised more than expected last month as food prices surged by the most in 26 years. But excluding food and energy, prices were nearly flat.” Therefore our dependence on fossil fuels as an energy source greatly dictates the changes in food prices.
Plastic Utensils/ Bags/ Containers
The Food Industry has great ties with the packaging industry ever since the 19th century. However this tie was even furthermore strengthened through the discovery of plastic. Plastic revolutionize the food industry by providing numerous of cheap methods of packaging and utensils, adding to the overall portability of food. Inventions allowed by the discovery of plastic are plastics containers, plastic utensils, plastic wrap, plastic bottles and caps. Every year the food industry invests millions of dollars into the packaging industry in order to allow this easy mobility of food. However the production of plastic requires a main energy source, which “surprisingly” turns out to be fossil fuels. Thus when the price of fossil fuels increases, so does the price of plastic. Thus food places that are dependent on plastic containers and utensils have their food prices subjected to changes in the price of plastic. The most affected food place around Brooklyn College would probably be the gyro cart due to their high usage of plastic containers, forks and bags. There have been many attempts discovering substitutes for plastic through natural means. For example Cereplast, a leader in the industry of providing Natural Plastics, expects its algae bio-plastic to replace 50% or more of the petroleum content in conventional plastics in the food industry. They believe the compostable bio-plastic made from algae can give a huge boost to this industry by providing an alternative to petroleum-based plastics. However this replacement has yet to be seen implemented on significant scale petroleum based plastics remain dominant in the food industry.
http://www.cereplast.com/homepage.php
Short term Solutions
1) One factor to considered is that not all the gasoline is converted into energy and one average cars only have a 20% efficiency rate meaning 80% of the gas an automobile uses is wasted and released as heat. So by improving car technology we can save a lot more gas and potential reduce food prices
2) The location of the food factories plays a large role. In the New York Times an articles said, “Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain…. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.” The long distance food transportation wastes a lot of gas per year. It would be more efficient if food factories were closer together or to invest in methods to do there own processing in the same factory they produced the food from.
3) Using more efficient types of energy such as solar powered windmills, nuclear powered power plants to power food production, processing and transportation.
4) Stop subsidizing farmers for not growing crops and unused land, which would have food prices drop. But if implemented on a large scale the prices for food will decrease dramatically as seen in the Great Depression in which the food industry collapsed and eventually resulted in starvation of many people.
*However the first and second solution is and will not solve out dependence on gasoline and other fossil fuels in the near future unless the 3rd solution is perfected and implemented. The fourth solution would provide very cheap food price for a very short period of time and obviously should be considered only in a small scale.
Overview: Economically speaking consumers and the corporation favor low costs. The low costs for the food industry promotes consumerism because it allows the industry to decrease food prices which increases profit because people buy more food, but only up to a certain scale when taking prices into consideration. Thus, generally the corporation and consumers favor low prices. However the sustainability of these low prices are very dependent on the environmental aspect of sustainability, mainly the natural resources portion. The dependence of the food industry for energy on fossil fuels seems insurmountable and remains a determining factor for the economic sustainability of food.
