Category
What families actually pay for food at home over 45 years — the spend-weighted bucket the headline uses, and the 13 staple items underneath it.
Food prices, the apple-to-apples story. Of the ten buckets in the Reality Index, food at home is the bucket where the official CPI does best. Industrial-scale agriculture has held retail food prices below overall inflation over 45 years — the groceries bucket grew 3.39× (CES spend-weighted, the figure the headline runs on) versus CPI's 3.91×. Equal-weighting the 13 staple items instead gives 3.03×.
The qualification: this is true in dollar terms only. The eggs of 2025 are not the eggs of 1980. See what Reality Index doesn't measure for the reverse-hedonics argument on industrial food.
Each card below links to the full chart page for that item — including retail dollar series, BLS CPI subindex for that category, and the long-history backstop where available. Multiples shown are 1980-anchored unless the underlying data series doesn't extend that far back.
Eggs
per dozen
Ground beef
per lb
Chicken breast
per lb
Whole milk
per gallon
Cheese (cheddar)
per lb
White bread
per lb
Flour
per lb
Pasta
per lb
Coffee
per lb
Bananas
per lb
Tomatoes
per lb
Potatoes
per lb
Breakfast cereal
BLS CPI subindex
Composite construction. Equal-weighted average of 13 individual food items: eggs, ground beef, chicken breast, whole milk, cheese, white bread, flour, pasta, coffee, bananas, tomatoes, potatoes, and breakfast cereal. Each item is indexed to its 1980 dollar price (or BLS subindex equivalent where dollar data starts after 1980, chained backward via the relevant CPI subindex). The composite is then a simple average of these indexes.
Two weightings. The headline figure above (3.39×) uses BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey spend-weights within the groceries bucket — larger weight to items families spend more on (meat, dairy, bread) — which is what the headline Reality Index runs on. The equal-weighted average of the 13 items (3.03×) is shown alongside to reveal what each item did on its own; it weights a pound of flour the same as a month of beef, so it lands lower.
Industrial agriculture caveat. The same retail item across decades may have different real-world quality. Industrial egg production, mass-produced broiler chicken, and grain-finished feedlot beef are different goods from their 1980 counterparts. The dollar prices have tracked CPI. The actual product has shifted. See what we don't measure.