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Show Food is Bargain " Today-Whatever - -You Might Think ' , This week, when "you" pushed your Thankgiving grocery cart through a checkout counter, take heart in the fact that no matter how staggering the sum may seem you're still getting a bargain. bar-gain. During the past ten years, take-home pay of the average American has jumped 30 per cent while food prices have increased in-creased only six per cent. And, despite the fact that the average family is well fed, it spends only 20 per cent of its income for food compared to 67 per cent 100 years ago. These and other appetizing items are served up this week in Life magazine's special food issue. Croplands in the U.S. cover 330,000,000 acres, more than the area of Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and Michigan combined. The food industry will spend more than $100,000,000 this year inventing and developing new products. That's two times what it spent five years ago. Growing, processing and selling sell-ing food requires the full-time efforts of 9,100,000 Americans, 32 times the population of Nevada. Ne-vada. Of all the products available to housewives today, two:thirds did not exist 10 years ago. In one year American farmers grow food worth over $27,000,-000.000. $27,000,-000.000. . The average American packs away 1,500 pounds of food a year. . . j The American woman takes her husband with her one out of two times she goes into a supermarket. super-market. The husband braves it alone one out of seven. It , costs . the , average , supermarket super-market $3,700 a year to replace equipment and merchandise damaged by youngsters. The frozen food packaged in the U.S. in one day weighs more than 30 Empire State buildings. Last year America manufactured manufac-tured enough frankfurters (7,-000,000,000) (7,-000,000,000) to wrap 26.5 times around the earth, emptied enough food cans to stretch to the moon and back three times, ate enough macaroni products to reach a point 60,000,000 miles beyond the sun. When you eat in a restaurant chances are one in three that your potatoes are powdered. The average New York shopper shop-per can buy with one hour's labor 21 times as much sugar, nine times as much butter and four times as much beef as his counterpart in Russia. A full 60 per cent of a Russian family's income goes for food. Americans eat 16,400,000 peanut pea-nut butter sandwiches a day. Americans ate 100 pounds less per person last year than they did 50 years ago. And, as a topper, Life describes de-scribes the largest dish prepared regularly anywhere in the world. It is one eaten by Bedouin tribesmen at wedding feasts and consists of: 1 whole camel stuffed with 1 sheep that has - been stuffed with several chickens, each stuffed with fish that have been stuffed with eggs. |