A Week of Groceries Cost a Quarter-Ounce of Gold in 1913. Now It Costs Far Less.

You've felt it at the grocery store. Eggs are ridiculous. Bread has become a luxury item. A gallon of milk costs more than a gallon of gas in some places. Ground beef is almost unaffordable. You push your cart through the produce section and feel the weight of sticker shock at every turn. Everyone feels it. The average American household now spends about $150 per week on groceries, and that number seems to climb faster than wages ever could.

In 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was established, a typical family spent about $5 per week on groceries. That's a 30-fold increase in dollars. By any headline measure, food has gotten wildly expensive.

But there's another way to measure it.

In 1913, gold traded at $20.67 per ounce. A week of groceries at $5 represented about 0.24 ounces of gold. Today, with gold near $4,600 per ounce, a week of groceries at $150 represents about 0.033 ounces of gold. You can buy a week of food with roughly one-seventh the gold your great-grandparents needed. And the 2026 grocery basket — Chilean grapes in February, Japanese wagyu at your doorstep, fifty-thousand products in a single store — is incomparably better than anything available in 1913.

Food didn't get expensive. The dollar got cheap. And the greatest revolution in agricultural history was hidden behind a collapsing currency.

The raw numbers

Before we decode what this means, let's look at the data. The table below shows weekly grocery expenditures at three moments: 1913 (the Fed's founding year), 1970 (the Bretton Woods distortion), and 2026 (today). Each figure is shown in dollars, converted to gold ounces at the historical price, and contextualized against what food actually represents in a modern budget.

Year	Weekly Groceries (USD)	Gold / oz	Groceries in Gold (oz)
1913	$5.00	$20.67	0.24 oz
1970	$30.00	$35.00	0.86 oz
2026	$150.00	~$4,600	~0.033 oz

The dollar story is straightforward: $5 to $30 to $150. Each generation pays vastly more. This is the only version of the narrative that mainstream media reports — rising food costs, rising anxiety, rising dependence on assistance programs.

The gold story is different. It shows food becoming dramatically cheaper relative to a stable store of value. The 1970 figure is elevated because, as with housing, gold was artificially pegged at $35 per ounce by the Bretton Woods agreement. The real purchasing power of gold in 1970 was much higher. If we account for the suppressed price, the 1970 figure probably should have been closer to 0.3 or 0.4 ounces of gold per week. Then the pattern becomes unmistakable: food in gold terms has collapsed in price over a century, from 0.24 ounces to 0.033 ounces.

Why? Not because people stopped eating. Because of one of the most significant technological achievements in human history.

What a "week of groceries" actually was

The comparison between 1913 food and 2026 food is not comparing like with like. And that's precisely what makes the gold-denominated stability so remarkable.

In 1913, "groceries" meant a very specific thing. There was no year-round produce section. Bananas existed, but you couldn't get them in January. Avocados were unknown. Milk had to be bought fresh daily from a local dairy or supplied by a cow in your yard. Butter and cheese were preserved and fatty — the only way to get calories through a winter. Bread was baked at home. Lard and salt pork were dietary staples. Vegetables were seasonal. Canning was how families survived the months between harvests. Refrigeration meant a block of ice from the iceman, delivered regularly at considerable expense. A household typically spent 35 to 40 percent of its income on food. For a working-class family, putting dinner on the table was a logistical project.

By 1970, the grocery store had transformed. Frozen vegetables and TV dinners made dinner quick. Supermarkets had begun shipping produce across regions. Synthetic pesticides and herbicides allowed year-round production. Canned goods lined the shelves. But the selection was still limited by season and region. A week of groceries still consumed a meaningful fraction of household income — roughly 17 percent.

In 2026, you can walk into a store and purchase produce from every continent in any season. Fresh Chilean grapes in February. Japanese wagyu beef shipped overnight to your door. Organic, conventional, heirloom varieties. Fifty-thousand different products under one roof. Meal-kit services deliver ingredients sized to your recipe. App-based delivery brings groceries to your door within hours. The choices are incomprehensible by 1913 standards. And households now spend roughly 10 percent of income on food.

You could freeze 0.24 ounces of gold in a vault in 1913, and in 2026 use that same gold to buy a week of groceries that would have looked like science fiction to your ancestors. You'd still have some gold left over. In terms of purchasing power, measured in something that doesn't decay, food didn't get more expensive. It got dramatically cheaper. The only lens that shows food getting expensive is a lens that's itself shrinking.

The invisible revolution

What made food so vastly more abundant and so much cheaper in real terms? The answer centers on four major innovations that happened to overlap with the creation of the Federal Reserve itself.

The first was the Haber-Bosch process, first put into industrial production in 1913 — the same year the Fed was created (the underlying patents were filed 1908–1910). Before Haber-Bosch, the only source of nitrogen fertilizer was guano, bird droppings shipped from South American islands at enormous expense. The process synthesized nitrogen from the air using steam and extreme pressure, making unlimited, cheap fertilizer available to every farmer on Earth. It's estimated that approximately half of all human protein today exists because of nitrogen fixed by Haber-Bosch. This was perhaps the single greatest invention in agricultural history, yet most people have never heard of it.

The second was mechanization. In 1913, one farmer could feed roughly ten people. A farmer used a horse, a plow, and muscle. Harvest was labor-intensive and seasonal. By 1970, one farmer could feed about 50 people. Today, with diesel tractors, GPS guidance, hybrid seeds, and industrial-scale operations, one farmer feeds approximately 150 people. The labor required has collapsed. The output per worker has multiplied twentyfold in a single lifetime.

The third was refrigerated transport and global supply chains. Strawberries could rot in a day. Refrigerated trucks, then refrigerated cargo ships, made it economical to grow them in one country and sell them fresh in another. Containerization standardized shipping. Modern logistics moved food across oceans and continents cheaply and quickly, making every regional crop available everywhere year-round.

The fourth was the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s — high-yield crop varieties, synthetic fertilizers scaled globally, pesticides, irrigation technology, and intensive farming techniques. Combined, these boosted crop yields per acre by 300 to 500 percent. What took ten acres in 1913 now takes one acre, with higher quality and reliability.

These are not marginal improvements. These are civilizational-scale productivity gains. One farmer now feeds 150 people instead of 10. That person produces more food with less input, less labor, less land, and more consistency. In real, fundamental terms, food became incomparably cheaper. Measured against something stable like gold, this productivity explosion shows clearly. Measured against the collapsing dollar, it disappears behind currency noise.

The grocery store illusion

Here's a thought experiment that makes the point concrete.

In 1913, imagine your grandmother decided to save money for a week of groceries in the distant future. She had two choices. She could set aside the $5 in cash, or she could set aside roughly 0.24 ounces of gold.

If she put the $5 in an old coffee can and buried it in the back yard, her descendants would dig it up in 2026 and discover it buys roughly one loaf of bread. That's it. The dollars survived, but their purchasing power was almost entirely destroyed.

If she set aside 0.24 ounces of gold, her descendants would take it to a dealer in 2026 and receive approximately $1,104. That's roughly seven weeks of groceries today. A 113-year-old store of value doesn't just preserve purchasing power; it compounds it. The gold kept the ability to buy a week of food across more than a century of war, depression, stagflation, crashes, and crisis — and actually increased the quantity you could buy.

Every time you wince at the grocery receipt, you're experiencing something real. But you're not seeing expensive food. You're seeing a cheap dollar. The food prices in dollars are up 30-fold. The food prices in gold are down. The productivity of agriculture has increased by orders of magnitude. But you can't see it in the dollar prices. The currency collapse masks the real progress.

Food didn't get expensive. The dollar got cheap. And the miracle of modern agriculture was hidden behind a shrinking currency.

This pattern isn't unique to food or housing or the past 113 years. It repeats across history. A Roman legionary's annual pay under Augustus was about 900 sestertii — roughly 9 gold aurei, or about 2.4 ounces of gold per year. That same gold today would buy several months of groceries. Medieval peasants spent roughly 20 percent of income on food; modern households spend 10 percent. Productivity gains are real. They're just invisible when you're measuring in money that's constantly being devalued.

What it means now

If the food supply has never been more abundant, if the variety has never been greater, if the cost in real terms has never been lower, then why do grocery budgets feel so tight? Why do people struggle to afford basic nutrition?

The answer isn't that food is scarce or expensive. It's that the unit of measurement is broken. Your paycheck is denominated in dollars. Your savings are in dollars. Your rent, your mortgage, your utility bills, everything except your gold reserves (if you have any) is measured in a currency that loses purchasing power continuously. The Fed's own stated goal is 2 percent annual inflation, which it frames as stability. At 2 percent inflation, held constant over a working life of 40 years, you lose 55 percent of your purchasing power. That's the best-case scenario.

You're not imagining the squeeze. But the squeeze isn't because food got more expensive. It's because what you're paid in — and what you save in, by default — is constantly being devalued. The miracle of agricultural productivity, the achievement of feeding 150 people with one farmer instead of 10, the miracle of getting Peruvian grapes in February — none of that appears in your standard of living because it's all absorbed by currency depreciation.

This is the second essay in The Great Remember's series on prices measured in gold. The first looked at housing — a house today costs roughly what it did in 1913 when measured in gold, despite being dramatically better and more spacious. Food follows the exact same pattern: cheaper in gold, more expensive in dollars, far better in reality.

The pattern will repeat. The next essay looks at education — and here the results are inverted. College tuition is one of the few things that has actually gotten more expensive in gold terms. That's a story worth understanding, because it's a story about something genuine going wrong, not just currency collapse.

This is the second essay in The Great Remember's series on prices, purchasing power, and the history of money. See all essays →