Food for Thought - The Economics of Eating

This week's blogpost - https://bahnsen.co/3RTyKah Trevor Cummings hosts the Thoughts on Money (TOM) podcast with Brett Bonecutter and Blaine Carver to discuss Brett’s article on food and its economic and cultural implications. They explore how nearly any topic connects to money, then reflect on family dinners, modern home layouts, and how convenience and abundance may reduce intentional time together. Brett shares “food dollar collapse” data: food fell from nearly 50% of household budgets in the early 1900s to 9.7% in 2025, while spending has flipped from mostly groceries to mostly eating out/convenience, and time in the kitchen dropped from six hours per day to about 45 minutes. They discuss trade-offs like lowered appreciation, snacking, delivery markups, loss of cooking skills, and “options overload” in stores with 32,000 items, plus a brief MAHA-related comparison of past low medical spending versus today’s higher costs. 00:00 Welcome to TOM 00:14 Why Talk About Food 02:15 Dinner Table Culture 06:30 Food Memories and Nostalgia 09:46 Food Dollar Collapse 15:29 Abundance Trade Offs 20:12 Convenience and Eating Out 22:04 Convenience And Doomscrolling 23:50 Cooking As Joy And Budget 26:55 Learning Kitchen Skills 28:36 Generations And Eating Out 30:42 MAHA Food And Healthcare 33:09 Pop Tarts And Choice Overload 36:09 Tradeoffs Gratitude And Wrap Links mentioned in this episode: http://thoughtsonmoney.com http://thebahnsengroup.com