The May 2022 edition of the Consumer Food Insights (CFI) survey from the Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability (CFDAS) at Purdue is now out. Most of our main tracking numbers, including the Sustainability Food Purchase (SFP) index, food insecurity, and food happiness remained steady. However, after a small dip last month, total food spending increased this month about 7% from the prior month. The survey also shows consumers reporting higher rates of food price increases in prior weeks and months than they had in earlier releases.
We added a couple new ad hoc questions this month. Following up on my last post about gardening, we added a question to measure the extent to which households grow food at home. A little over 20% of respondents said they are growing food at home in a garden (whether people consider herbs on the windowsill a “garden” is something we’ll have to probe in the future). About 5% said they grow food in a community garden. Almost three-quarters of consumers are not gardening, with the majority of those never intending to do so.
Given the dramatic rise in fertilizer prices facing farmers, and some of the media speculation about how how farmers should be responding, we thought we’d probe our consumers on some of these issues by asking the extent to which respondents agreed with a series of questions. The highest level of agreement was with the statement that “farmers know best how much fertilizer to use on their field.” Despite popular agreement that “farmers know best” there was also a lot of agreement that farmers should be fertilizing differently than they are now. There was a widespread view that a move to organic, compost, and manure fertilizer are preferable, although it should be noted that the questions did not mention the consequences for food prices or food availability. Almost half of consumers neither agreed nor disagreed that “synthetic fertilizers are necessary to keep food prices low.” Such results suggest a lack of understanding about the impacts of use of fertilizer in agriculture (the recent example of Sri Lanka’s price spikes following a ban on synthetic fertilizer is a particularly pertinent example).
In this month’s CFI report, we did a deeper dive into how responses varied by race. One salient result relates to food insecurity. Black and Hispanic individual were much more likely to be food insecure as compared to white and Asian individuals.
Food Security and Insecurity by Race
There is a lot more in the report.
Finally, as I noted in last month’s release, we’ve created a data dashboard to explore some of the responses to questions in current and past editions of the Consumer Food Insights survey. The dashboard focuses allows the user to see how responses vary by demographic characteristics of respondents.