Making Sense of Food Prices:

[Talonos]

I'm GMing a very granular play-by-post game in a fantasy setting and wanted to know how much food would cost per meal. Here's what I've found:

B265 says that Cost of Living (CoL) includes food, clothing, housing, and entertainment, but it doesn't way how much of your standard of living goes towards food. It does, however, say that the rules assume you either prepare meals at home _or_ that you always eat out at places one level below your status, and we can calculate the cost of eating out. A restaurant meal costs 1% of your CoL (except for dinner, which costs 2% CoL) meaning 4% of your CoL per day would go to food if you ate out every day at a status-appropriate restaurant. Multiply this by a 30 day month, and you get 120% of your CoL to eat out at equal-status restaurants. Thus, we can assume that home-prepared food costs 120% of the status of living one level lower than you. For instance, at status zero, you spend 120% of a status negative-one's CoL, or $360.

This seems suspicious to me for several reasons. For one, GURPS does not differentiate between dinner and other meals anywhere else, so far as I can tell. For instance, in Low-Tech Companion 3, the rules on foraging just refer to "Meals", and we are told each pound of meat counts as one "Meal". Given that B265 is the only place I know of where dinner is given special treatment, there are a couple of conclusions we could come to:

• GURPS characters who eat at restaurants eat smaller breakfasts and lunches and bigger dinners to compensate.
• Restaurants charge double the price for the same amount of food at dinner.

Either way, we end up with a rough "per meal" cost of your _previous_ tier's 1.33% CoL per meal.

At any rate, this means that this means that for a status 0 person, with a "Large Apartment" and a car, $360 of his $600 CoL goes to food and $240 goes to housing. This is the second strange point: spending this much for food seems excessive to me, speaking as an on-the-nose middle-class person living in the US. Perhaps I'm just unusually frugal, but I spend less than half that per person on my family of four, and I'm buying food in 2023 dollars, not 2005-era GURPS dollars. The $240 for housing doesn't make much sense either. It seems that an unfurnished apartment cost about $942 on average. With two Status 0 earners you could do it, but not have enough left to feed them. Median income in the US seems to be around status 1... but it sure won't buy you a boat like B266 suggests!

But let's ignore that for now. You can derive from RaW that a Status 0 meal is $4. B265 also says that a weeks worth of travel rations is 5% of your standard of living, meaning it's $30 for 21 trail meals. Another head-turning number. I'd have expected carefully preserved, pre-prepared meals to cost more money than normal meals, not less.

If meals are that much less expensive, it could mean a few things:

• Trail rations could be worse food, equivalent to a status one lower than eating at home.
• Trail rations are less food, enough to subsist on temporarily, but unhealthy to live on for long stretches of time, therefore costing less because there's less there.

So how much does food cost?

Amusingly, you can make up any number and have it be right; the only difference is that your initial assumption changes who eats it.

You can say an orange costs $100. If that's the case, then a meal of four oranges costs $400. 1.33% of $30,000 is $400, which is partway between the CoL status 4 and status 5, so oranges would be a meal fit as an occasional treat for status 5 people or cheap fare for status 6 people. For another example, let's take bread. B27 suggests that a loaf of bread "or equivalent staple" is $1. The size of a loaf of bread varies, but let's presume it's enough for three meals. Three meals for a Status -1 person is $4, and while the rules don't suggest what the price of a Status -2 meal is (because there's no Status -3 restaurant meals to compare to) we could perhaps assume Status -3, if it existed, would be half the cost of living of Status -2? If so, three meals would be worth $2 at status -2, still double our price of bread. Hmn. Perhaps this loaf of bread is a small loaf, that only provides a meal and a half?

Are there any other places I should be looking for rules regarding food, food prices, and cost of living?

[RGTraynor]

Yes: in primary sources, as opposed to gamebooks.

With that, in comparing relative "how much of your disposable income you spend for basic expenses?", these are extremely era-specific. In 1969, my parents were decidedly working-class poor. Neither had yet turned thirty, and they had three small sons. They lived in one half of a small duplex, and me and my two brothers shared a 10x10 bedroom. There was a single battered used car, maybe a hundred books (many of them scrounged), a 12" black and white TV, a cheap phonograph, a washing machine (drying was a clothesline), and dad's tools. That's it.

Even for dirt-poor Westerners today, we can safely say that living standards are incomparably better ... and this is well within living memory.

[whswhs]

It depends on historical era. Before the Industrial Revolution, the majority of cost of living was buying food, probably between 50% and 90%. See for example The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert C. Allen, which has illustrative household "market baskets" for both subsistence and respectable lifestyles. It sounds as if your calculation has food costing about 60% of CoL, which is right in the ballpark.

This is consistent with the fact that in premodern times, the overwhelming majority of the work force was in the agricultural sector. So if you look at household budgets, the majority of the things they purchased were the products of agricultural labor. Admittedly that included fiber and fuel as well as food, but those other two items were relatively minor parts of the budget.

The other note I'd make is that while those market baskets don't seem to include a cost of housing, it looks to me as if the value of housing came to about 5% of monthly expenditures. Our era, when it's recommended that you spend no more than a third of your income on housing costs—and a lot of households are struggling, having to pay more than THAT—is a historical anomaly.

If you want to run scenarios set in TL5 and up, remember that monthly incomes are way above "subsistence." So a character might be spending $360 a month on food—but actually earn $6000 a month, not $600.

[Pursuivant]

If you want historical food prices you need to go to primary sources, as WHS said, and then put them in context by year (good harvest or bad?), ongoing historical events (war? plague?) and location (e.g., With few exceptions, central London or Tokyo have been relatively expensive places to live for the last 800 years).

Some of the GURPS 3E historical books have useful data. For example, this entry from GURPS 3E Japan 2E:

"vegetarian meal: soup, rice, and pickled vegetables, 10 coppers [~$0.40]; with salted fish, $1 silver; with fresh fish, $2."

That's relative to an average starting wealth of $1000 and a monthly cost of living of $80.

There are also rules in one of the Transhuman Space books for relative wealth in areas of the world where average wealth is higher or lower than Average. That's useful to get some sense of disparity in national or global costs of living.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by whswhs

The other note I'd make is that while those market baskets don't seem to include a cost of housing, it looks to me as if the value of housing came to about 5% of monthly expenditures. Our era, when it's recommended that you spend no more than a third of your income on housing costs—and a lot of households are struggling, having to pay more than THAT—is a historical anomaly.

As I recall, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management suggested that a household should pay no more than 1/8th of its income in rent as a general rule.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Talonos

B265 says that Cost of Living (CoL) includes food, clothing, housing, and entertainment, but it doesn't way how much of your standard of living goes towards food. It does, however, say that the rules assume you either prepare meals at home _or_ that you always eat out at places one level below your status, and we can calculate the cost of eating out. A restaurant meal costs 1% of your CoL (except for dinner, which costs 2% CoL) meaning 4% of your CoL per day would go to food if you ate out every day at a status-appropriate restaurant. Multiply this by a 30 day month, and you get 120% of your CoL to eat out at equal-status restaurants. Thus, we can assume that home-prepared food costs 120% of the status of living one level lower than you. For instance, at status zero, you spend 120% of a status negative-one's CoL, or $360.

Background costs like Cost of Living and the 80% of your starting wealth you don't get to spend at character creation are NOT meant to be broken down into components. They don't add up; they were never meant to add up. You will get nonsense numbers if you do this. They are a game device meant to simplify the calculation of costs not related to adventuring.

If you want to handle all these costs yourself, you must abandon the Cost of Living numbers and any other "background costs" and handle all the money yourselves.

[bocephus]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Background costs like Cost of Living and the 80% of your starting wealth you don't get to spend at character creation are NOT meant to be broken down into components. They don't add up; they were never meant to add up. You will get nonsense numbers if you do this. They are a game device meant to simplify the calculation of costs not related to adventuring.

If you want to handle all these costs yourself, you must abandon the Cost of Living numbers and any other "background costs" and handle all the money yourselves.

Yes this.

Your struggle is taking the "CoL" number and trying to extrapolate more detail than is intended.

Either use CoL and ignore the things it covers, OR just make price lists and go from there.

There are many skills that will also impact the food nutrition and price. A whole animal is far cheaper than the sum of its meat broken down into marketable packages. Garden produce is both better for you and far less expensive IF you have the skill to grow it. Skills relating to Herbs, Spices, distilling, fermenting, and merchant (barter, haggle, trade) would also apply to this level of granularity.

Which demonstrates rather handily why most people stop at the level of CoL for non-adventure related pricing

[Anthony]

GURPS CoL has a fundamental problem that it's trying to use a constant price. Constant price can be an okay approximation for most of what GURPS uses it for, where it's assuming "the same thing has the same cost regardless of TL and setting" -- most concepts of constant dollars (or whatever) do it via assuming a constant basket of goods and services that has a constant cost -- but the problem for CoL is that it isn't even the same thing; what you're getting for your money is completely different at TL 3 vs TL 8, so there's no reason it should be a constant cost.

Of course, in the case of food, if you're talking raw materials it might really be a constant product; it's not crazy to say "the price of a loaf a pound of beans is TL-independent". However, this is barely ever relevant to GURPS CoL, as it works out to something like a dollar a day using the GURPS constant dollar (roughly 2004).

IMO the easiest way to handle things like status-based cost of living is to just say "maintaining your status requires 5 points of relevant disadvantages. This is usually either Debt or some sort of Duty".

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by Rupert

As I recall, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management suggested that a household should pay no more than 1/8th of its income in rent as a general rule.

I wish this were possible today... send all landlords to Mrs Beeton for re-education!

[Otaku]

Originally Posted by Talonos

Restaurants charge double the price for the same amount of food at dinner.

That's probably not a bad approximation. In reality, the margin varies from item to item; some might have thin margins but for various reasons (usually as a draw) that item's price is kept as low as it can be. Other items have crazy high margins.

Not sure how a "real" restaurant works, but I worked fast-food long enough to become a shift supervisor, and be put in charge of inventory and weekending paperwork. I know our biggest expense was labor, then probably building costs. The actual food wasn't free, but 25% to 75% markups were common; with fast-food, you're paying for the convenience, both in terms of speed and location. Sometimes there's stuff that would be more expensive to fix at home, but it is usually due to specialized equipment inflating the cost or the sheer volume of product ordered, prepared, and sold for the restaurant drastically reducing the cost per unit for the restaurant.