More peas please? Thanksgiving meal costs Americans less this year

investing.com:

By Howard Schneider

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — With gas prices and airfares falling it will be cheaper for Americans to get to Grandma's or wherever they celebrate Thanksgiving this year, and when they arrive they'll find another happy price shock: The turkey and sides will cost less than last year.

The American Farm Bureau Federation's annual survey of holiday food prices out Wednesday shows the full spread will run a party of 10 about 4.5% less in 2023 than in 2022.

The bureau annually gets a nationwide group of shoppers to price 11 ingredients needed for the traditional meal of turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, rolls, peas, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie, a menu that might trigger mealtime dissent about the peas but, this year at least, not about the cost. Seven of the 11 ingredients saw price declines over the year, including the centerpiece poultry down 5.6%, to $27.35 for a 16-pound bird, as of the first week of November compared to the year before.

Shoppers «will see some relief in food prices for their Thanksgiving dinner,» farm bureau economist Betty Resnick wrote of this year's survey results, though she noted that the $61.17 total bill for the meal was still about 25% above where it was in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her analysis, in fact, and the evolution of the farm bureau's Thanksgiving meal prices are a micro-version of the larger pandemic inflation story that households, elected officials and the Federal Reserve have been grappling with.

The bad news: The pandemic's impact on what economists refer to as the «price level» has been demonstrable, an across-the-board shift higher that is unlikely to reverse. The farm bureau's data showed the cost of the annual meal stayed in a narrow range from $48.96