Christmas lunch is the latest victim of the cost of living crisis thanks to a spike in food prices.
Big jumps in the prices of everything pushed the Consumer Price Index (CPI), Which measures the rise in the costs of goods, to much higher increases than we are accustomed to.
The CPI has mostly remained at or below the Reserve Bank’s target range of 2 to 3 per cent per annum over the past 10 years.
But after the coronavirus-induced decline in 2020, it began to rise, and rose sharply throughout the past year.
While the rate of increase has begun to slow this year, Australians are now paying 16 per cent more for goods and services than they did in December 2019 before the coronavirus outbreak.
This means that the traditional Christmas lunch, which is often the only time many spend big on expensive foods, costs much more than it did even two years ago.
We crunched the numbers and they showed that a traditional family lunch of turkey with all the trimmings plus ham would cost $192.
This is $27 More than before the pandemic — a whopping $21 more More expensive than at Christmas 2021.
Based on the Sydney Consumer Price Index for each subcategory, there has been a 16 per cent increase in the price of traditional Christmas fare since December 2019.
Bread and cheese have the biggest increases
Australian households spend 17 per cent of their budgets on food – the second highest category after housing.
Previous years’ prices are based on the Sydney Consumer Price Index for each subcategory.
Our festive menu includes 1kg prawns, 3.8kg turkey, half a 4.5kg smoked ham, potatoes, carrots, parsnips and Brussels sprouts.
For dessert, we also buy Christmas pudding and cream pavlova and get bottles of white and sparkling wine to wash it all down, before finishing with Camembert cheese.
The meal will feed around eight people with leftovers and is based on the average price of everything from shopping at Coles, Aldi or Woolworths.
Anyone who loves cheese will have noticed prices rising long before Christmas, with the category up 28 per cent since the end of 2019.
A wheel of Camembert costs $11.45 this year, up from $8.
The price of cheese rose 15 percent in the year to September, followed by bread at 12 percent, the highest increases in the food category of the CPI.
Farm milk prices are to blame for the increase in dairy products, according to the ABS.
A Christmas turkey will cost about $32 this Christmas, up from about $26 in 2019.
While CPI data for the December quarter won’t be published until next year, there was some good news in October’s monthly inflation data.
The prices of poultry fell by 0.7 percent, cheese by 0.4 percent, and vegetables by 2.1 percent during the period from September to October.
Economist Gigi Foster from the University of New South Wales said “crop luck” affected fruit and vegetable prices, and bumper harvests helped bring down costs.
“If you look at certain categories, where we make our own food, and we’ve been very fortunate with the items, there actually hasn’t been as big an increase as other areas,” she said.
How to make Christmas lunch more affordable
Professor Foster said shopping at independent stores, farmers and Christmas markets and avoiding supermarket chains was the best way to save money.
“We’re getting the kind of increases that companies can get away with because there’s not a lot of competition in a lot of different sectors. And certainly the grocery sector is one of those sectors,” she said.
Professor Foster said shopping at independent specialist stores not only saves money, but sends a message to big business by rewarding suppliers who offer consumers goods for less money.
“Because that’s how they find out they won’t be able to survive, customers stay away, because the prices are too high.”
This month the Green Party led a Senate inquiry to question price fixing by supermarket giants.
Buying in season is another way to save money.
An abundance of fruits and vegetables hits the market with the arrival of the harvest season, causing prices to fall.
Professor Foster said: “If you’re prepared, like if you have a fridge or a freezer, you can buy 5kg of peaches or something like that and then store them and freeze them.”
“You can actually partially immunize yourself against future price increases.”
She also suggests “rebalancing” the shopping cart by substituting foods from other categories that may be cheaper, for example roasting chicken instead of lamb and using almonds instead of cow’s milk.
“It gives you a lot of opportunities to try new things, you know. We’ve had really interesting, fun experiments, trying new juices, new recipes for things, you know, just taking advantage of things that are in season,” she said.