FEW THINGS sit closer to the heart of Americana than the hamburger. In the early 1970s John Updike, an acute observer of American life, described the country as “a hamburger kingdom, one cuisine, under God, indivisible, with pickles and potato chips for all”. At the time, the hamburger was a democratic meal: cheap, plentiful and available to almost everyone.
That kind of meal is getting harder to find lately. Grocery prices in America are 30% or so higher than in early 2020, before the covid-19 pandemic. This adds about $1,600 to the average household’s annual food bill. Average wages have risen by a similar amount, leaving the overall affordability of groceries little changed.
However, that aggregate masks sharp and unpredictable increases in the prices of some staples, which consumers tend to notice particularly. A recent survey by the Kitchen Table Project, an advocacy group, found groceries to be Americans’ biggest source of financial pressure, with meat and poultry causing the most stress. As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary on July 4th, the Independence Day cookout offers a timely measure of what classic Americana costs.
To calculate the bill, The Economist has created a summer BBQ Index, tracking ten cookout staples in 25 American cities. Our basket should feed four hungry adults and includes protein (1.5 pounds, or 675g of rib-eye steak, two pounds of ground beef and of frying chicken, and a pack of pork sausage), carbs (two pounds of potatoes, a big bag of potato crisps, which Americans insist on calling chips, and a loaf of bread), beverages (a 64-ounce, or two-litre, bottle of Coke and a six-pack of beer) and lettuce. Using prices gathered by the Council for Community and Economic Research, a think-tank, we then compared the cost of our basket with median hourly pay in each metro area to see how long the typical worker must toil to afford it all.
The index offers an unappetising conclusion. Across the 25 cities in our sample, the basket now costs an average of $81, 12% more than a year ago, the fastest annual increase in a decade (see chart 1, top panel). That far outpaced grocery-price inflation of less than 3%, reflecting the unusually sharp increases in several items in our barbecue basket. Chart: The Economist
The recent jump also forms part of a broader reversal. Between 2016 and 2021 cookout prices were broadly flat, while median wages edged higher, making the meal steadily more affordable. That trend has reversed (see chart 1, bottom panel). Over the past five years the basket has risen in price by over 40%, roughly twice as fast as median pay across the cities surveyed. The typical worker must now labour 16 minutes longer than in 2020 to afford the spread.
Las Vegas is the least affordable city (see chart 2). The odds are stacked against workers, who must labour nearly four hours to pay for a 4th of July feast. Miami, Honolulu and New Orleans are also pricey.
Because food prices vary less across cities than wages do, places dominated by tourism, hospitality and other low-paid services fare especially poorly. The pattern flips in richer cities. Cookout prices are highest in cities like Boston and San Francisco. Yet high median wages still make both cities among the most affordable in which to fire up the grill this summer.
What is pushing up the barbecue bill? Ground-beef inflation looks comparatively mild in our sample, partly because prices were already elevated a year ago. Nationally, they rose by nearly 20% in the year to the first quarter. For a family buying two pounds a week, that adds roughly $10 a month to the cost of hamburgers. Steak prices climbed even faster in our index, by more than 25% on average. Other parts of the basket are becoming more expensive, too. Across the 25 cities in our index, a two-litre bottle of Coca-Cola rose in price by about 15%, while a bag of potato crisps was up by roughly 10%.
The price-rises in our basket feed into a broader argument over what is causing food inflation. One popular explanation is corporate price-gouging. This accusation has united figures as different as Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission under President Joe Biden, and Donald Trump, who in December ordered an investigation into anti-competitive behaviour in the food supply chain.
Yet the evidence is thin. Adjusted profit margins at Kroger and Albertsons, two of America’s largest supermarket chains, have been flat or falling in recent years. Meat processors are faring even worse. Tyson Foods, America’s largest meat company, expects to lose as much as $500m from its beef business in 2026. JBS, one of its meatiest rivals, said in June it would close two beef-processing plants.
The likelier culprits lie further up the supply chain: a cattle shortage, costly farm policies and high energy prices caused by war in Iran, plus Mr Trump’s fondness for tariffs. Together they are pushing up not just the price of the annual summer cookout but also the weekly grocery bill.
The trouble starts on the ranch. America’s cattle herd has shrunk for seven consecutive years, to a 75-year low. Droughts forced ranchers to sell animals early, just as high feed and fuel costs have made rebuilding herds unattractive. The result is less beef on the hoof just as a protein-obsessed public wants ever more of it. Across the 25 cities in our sample, ground beef costs over 80% more than in 2019, and steak around 70% more.
The shortage has deepened in the past year. New World screwworm, a parasite that can kill untreated livestock, prompted America to halt live-cattle imports from Mexico, further tightening supply. The discovery of the worm in Texan calves in June caused fresh alarm. With many ranchers nearing retirement, cattle herds may be slow to rebuild. Prices are therefore likely to rise further in the years ahead.
Biofuel policy is adding to food costs. The “renewable fuel standard”, which requires refiners to blend minimum volumes of biofuels into petrol and diesel, has long diverted corn and vegetable oils from the food supply. The shift has speeded up in recent years, adding pressure to commodity prices. Mr Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 expanded subsidies for biomass-based diesel. Last year Mr Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) extended support for corn ethanol. Refiners now consume about one-third of America’s corn crop. Nearly half of domestically produced soyabean oil goes into biofuel. This has helped push up the oil’s prices, which in turn show up in the price of everything from potato crisps to mayonnaise. Got mulch?
Fertiliser adds another layer of cost. The price of natural gas, the main input in nitrogen plant food, surged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 disrupted supplies to Europe. Prices later eased, but were climbing again even before the Iran war, as demand strengthened and China restricted exports. Because nitrogen fertiliser touches almost every big crop, pricier fertiliser has a habit of fertilising prices throughout the supermarket.
Lastly, though the courts have struck down Mr Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, other import taxes are working their way into the Independence Day grill. The duty on aluminium rose to 50% in June 2025 and new ones on chemical inputs have made plastics more expensive. That has raised packaging costs for soft-drink bottlers and snackmakers. The pressure is already visible at the factory gate: producer prices for carbonated soft drinks rose at an annualised rate of nearly 20% in the first quarter.
Relief for grocery shoppers is unlikely to come quickly. Although the truce between America and Iran has brought oil prices down, the war’s effects on transport and fertiliser costs will take time to work through the food supply chain. At home, the administration has proposed larger biofuel mandates and shelved plans to ease restrictions on beef imports.
The OBBBA has also tightened work requirements and narrowed eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme, America’s main food-assistance scheme. The Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-wing think-tank, estimates that participation has fallen by more than 4m since the law was enacted last July. Poor households are therefore getting less help with food costs. At the same time, wage growth is slowing, making it less likely that pay-cheques will catch up.
None of this will stop Americans gathering round the grill on July 4th. They may serve a bit less meat, work a bit longer to pay for the spread and, if they live outside city centres, spend over $100 filling the tank of their Ford F-150 pickup that gets them to the grocer’s. Yet American abundance will be on full display: sparklers in hand, coolers stocked with Budweiser and tables piled high (not just with lettuce). Surveying such plenty, Updike once called America a “vast conspiracy to make you happy”. The conspiracy may have got dearer. But when the grilling is done, its happy victims at least have air-conditioning to cool their anger at the bill.■
Generally when you make a graph like this, you want each line to be as distinct as possible, not have four separate items on the list all be different shades of grey.
Tbf half the items on the chart are just different kinds of meat
Coke prices inputs
Vegan gang stay winning (relatively speaking)
Crazy that in Ami-land burger or more particularly cow is considered like some sort of grain staple. Rather than being a result of certain ideologies and incentives around land use coming from settlerism and capitalism.
the burger is the “cheap cut of meat with too much salt, too much fat” typical of peasant food. the cheap cuts of meat given a little style, as described in this scene from Burnt, which puts it into a historical context.
it’s absolutely an appropriate item to index to life among the working class in the west. the first and most visible meat alternatives in the west are in service to the burger form. the black bean patty, the “impossible” burger, etc.
western snobs, myself included, love to shit on the burger as the food choice of the culturally stunted or unsophisticated because it appears everywhere we look as a placeholder for loading all the cultural baggage we have for US imperial foodways. fast food advertising is legit deranged about what it means to eat a burger.
but there’s a certain point where crapping on it becomes more about being a snob than iconoclassism or critical theory.
at its most basic Ur-form, a layer of grilled, seasoned protein (like a bean patty) with fresh sliced veg, condiments (including a salty/vinegary/acidic “sauce”), and able to be held in a bun is kind of brilliant and has a complex texture when assembled and layered just before eating.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
