The always excellent Matthew Kahn reminded me today of the Stigler diet: George Stigler’s famous 1945 journal article The Cost of Subsistence in the Journal of Farm Economics. Stigler posed this problem:
For a moderately active man (economist) weighing 154 pounds, how much of each of 77 foods should be eaten on a daily basis so that the man’s intake of nine nutrients (including calories) will be at least equal to the recommended dietary allowances suggested by the National Research Council in 1943, with the cost of the diet being minimal.
Stigler managed to find a nearly optimal daily diet of:
- 1.6 pounds of wheat flour,
- 0.3 pounds of cabbage,
- 0.6 ounces of spinach,
- 0.4 pounds of pancake flour,
- 1.1 ounces of pork liver.
All of this food necessary to sustain health and weight of a moderately active man amounted to $0.16 per day in 1944, which is an annual cost of $39.93, not including leap years. A recent update for inflation put the annual cost of the Stigler diet at $561.43 in 2005. Not more than two dollars a day .
Stigler later concluded that the main issue about food consumption is a preference for a variety rather than a nutritional diet which could be obtained very low cost if you like cabbage, spinach, flour and a little bit of pork liver. For many years, pork liver was not available in my local supermarkets in Australia and New Zealand until recently when Asian buyers started to buy again.
When various claims made about child poverty and children going without food, and adults too, the purpose of the Stigler diet in the calculations of the cost of subsistence is to show that it is actually extremely cheap to get the necessities of life in a capitalist society. Something more than either a lack of income in a modern welfare state or far from high prices of this extremely cheap, but spartan diet must be playing a role.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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