The latest edition of the Consumer Food Insights survey is now out.
In terms of the headline statistics, we saw a slight decrease in spending on food at home and a fall in consumers’ inflation expectations. Many of our other measures, including food insecurity, the sustainable food purchasing index, and food happiness remained steady.
Despite small changes in our headline numbers, this might be the most interesting report we’ve yet produced. We did a deep dive into how our various survey measures differ by political ideology, and we also asked a few questions about how people were experiencing and responding to the summer heat waves.
First, I want to highlight a general question we asked about budget stress. We asked people which three items were causing the most and which three items were causing least stress in their budgets (out of a set of 12 items). Then, we subtracted the percentage of times each item was picked as most stressful from the percentage of times each item was picked as least stressful to create a budget stress index that potentially ranges form -100 to + 100 for each item.
Which item causes the most stress? Food, followed by gas and rent/mortgage. The ranking is interesting in that it seems to reflect Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and it highlights the prominent place that food plays in household financial well being. The result also helps explain why food price inflation has been a big topic of conversation over the course of the past year. The figure below shows these general trends and how they differ for people who said they were (or were not) affected by extreme heat this summer.
Overall, 65% of people said “yes” they had been affected by extreme heat this summer. For people who said “yes”, we followed up and asked how their behaviors changed in response to the heat. The figure below shows the results. Respondents said they spent less time working outdoors and shifted somewhat towards meals eaten at home as a response to heat.
In terms of political ideology, we noted some similarities between conservatives and liberals. In particular, liberals and conservatives tend to spend about the same amount of money on food (after adjusting for income) except at the highest income levels, and both liberals and conservatives report similar and very high levels of happiness with their diets.
Where do the differences come in?
Liberals indicate they’ve experienced less food price inflation over the past year and expect lower food price inflation in the future as compared to conservatives.
Liberals score more highly on the sustainable food price index, primarily because of the higher scores on (and higher weights placed on) environment and social issues as compared to conservatives. By contrast, conservatives score higher on economic and taste dimensions.
Liberals are about twice as likely to identify as vegetarian or vegan as compared to moderates and conservatives and are more likely to say they garden.
Conservatives are more likely to trust family, personal care physicians, friends, USDA, and food companies for information about food than liberals. The opposite is true of the FDA, New York Times, CNN, and Universities.
There are sizable differences between liberals and conservatives in terms of behaviors and beliefs about the food system. The figure below shows the break-down in terms of beliefs.
There is a lot more in the August report. You can read the whole thing here.