Food, as a commodity, is much cheaper than most people think. The price of rice is hovering around $400 per metric ton. Wheat is less than $250. Soybeans abo

Food, as a commodity, is much cheaper than most people think. The price of rice is hovering around $400 per metric ton. Wheat is less than $250. Soybeans about $400. Pork is about $1500 per metric ton, Beef about 3 times that. According to random sites I googled, the average american eats just under a metric ton of food a year. Depending on what you eat, you could potentially eat for a year on considerably less than $1000, if you bought food at commodity prices. The reason we can't buy food at that price is because of all of the processing and handling that goes on between the farmer and the plate. A restaurant is just another level of processing and handling, so it appears to the average consumer that it isn't much more expensive than cooking at home. In reality, it is possible to source food in large quantities and to do all the processing yourself at a significantly reduced cost. There are even groups of people who do this for fun. With the advent of the internet it is now easier than ever to do it. However, the reason that this is not so popular is that most people in the western world are comparatively rich and have no free time. Most people don't care if they can cut $1000 a year from their food budget if it means that they have to invest 2 hours a day to do it. Many, many families have dual incomes, so even if we say that we could cut their overall household food budget by $4000, they wouldn't do it because they would have to give up one of those incomes. So, I don't think restaurants have gotten cheaper -- people have gotten richer, but have given up time to get the money.