The government has an inflation-busting meal idea:
“It can cost around $3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla and one other thing,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Wednesday on the NewsNation channel.
It isn’t a piece of cake.
Grocery prices have been on the rise and remain stubbornly high, ticking up 2.4% in December from a year earlier, according to government data. That is largely because of rising costs for some staples like beef and coffee. At the same time, the government just rolled out food guidelines that suggest eating a lot more protein while cutting processed foods.
“So there is a way to do this that actually will save the average American consumer money,” Rollins said. She also said the government had run “over 1,000 simulations” of possible meal options based on retail prices that meet its dietary guidelines of meat, vegetables, grains and dairy.
A spokesman for the Agriculture Department said it found thousands of meal combinations that would meet its criteria at about $10 a day—roughly $3 a meal. That meal, in this instance, would include 3 ounces of chicken, a cup of vegetables, a tortilla and a dairy item.
Wall Street Journal reporters hit grocery stores in two cities, Boston and New Orleans, to look for a meal as Rollins described at that price…