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Editor's ViewpointMeditations Of A Minnesota Mossback |
Ruts & Potholes … Food Prices … And The Typical Conestoga Wagon
Daughter No. 2, who recently moved to San Francisco, sent me a plaintive e-mail a few weeks ago.
“I can’t believe how much more expensive the food is!” she wrote. “Rice-a-Roni is $2.09! I thought it’d be close to free here since it’s the San Francisco treat! In Madison it was always 99 cents.”
It was enough to make me want to send a care package. (I did.)
I am reminded of my great-great-great-grandfather, who rode on the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri to the Oregon country. Although he was technically no blood relation to me (we are related by adoption), I honor the connection.
I was born with his last name.
Left weak from dysentery, great-great-great-grandpa rode much of the way to Oregon in the back of a Conestoga wagon, keeping a diary and penning letters back home while his healthy, stalwart wife drove the oxen. (I am told that great-great-great grandma died young after being thrown from a horse; her husband lived to a ripe old age in the Willamette Valley. Go figure.)
In great-great-great-grandpa’s accounts, he expressed his extreme displeasure with the terrible ruts and potholes on the trail—rattling around on blankets in the back surely wasn’t comfortable—and his shock at the inflated food prices back in Independence.
Perhaps things haven’t changed all that much since then.
In Independence, where many wagon trains began, the typical Conestoga wagon started out loaded with flour, sugar, corn meal, bacon, coffee beans, lard, spices, dried fruit, beans, rice, and a keg of pickles. Food costs varied considerably, but according to one museum Web site, Independence merchants charged 2 cents per pound for flour; sugar, 4 cents per pound; bacon, a nickel. Coffee was 10 cents per pound; tea, an astronomical 60 cents per pound.
Oil wasn’t on the horizon yet.
Of course, prices were likely inflated in Independence, where families were forced to purchase goods quickly and compete with other wagon trains stocking up for the journey west.
Today, you can buy high-quality coffee beans for around $10 per pound.
(For that price, you can also buy an “Oregon Trail” computer game T-shirt with the inscription “You Have Died of Dysentery”—just ask most any university student.)
Since the 1850s, then, coffee seems to have increased in price by roughly 100 times. Bacon seems to fit that inflation formula, too: high-quality bacon now sells for about $5 per pound at some specialty stores; it’s a little less at Cub.
If flour were to show a similar increase, it would cost $2 per pound today. But as much as the cost of flour has gone up, we haven’t yet seen the day when a 5-pound bag of flour costs $10.
Two years ago, though, a 25-pound bag of bread flour cost less than $5 at Sam’s Club. Last week, the same bag of flour cost over $9.
I obsess over the price of flour because I’ve baked my own bread for 30 years. Our family plows through several loaves of home-baked bread a day. A loaf of similar “designer” bread purchased in stores now costs between $3 and $5.
The price of a loaf of bread baked at my house has doubled – from 16 cents a loaf to 32 cents a loaf, not counting the cost of the natural gas for the oven and the electricity to run my KitchenAid mixer with the bread hook.
I can make a dozen loaves of bread for the price of a gallon of gasoline.
Somehow, this strikes me as something to write home about.