How much do you pay for tomatoes? Bananas? What about for your garlic?
If you are one of the 90 per cent of Australian shoppers who buy garlic imported from China you're spending around $2/kg. Buying organic, locally-produced garlic on the other hand, can set you back $38/kg. But don't be fooled about which is really cheaper.
Throughout his 2007 election campaign Kevin Rudd pledged to address what he termed 'inflated grocery prices,' contending that 'the increasing cost of living is felt most sharply by families at the local supermarket'.
In reality, Australians are spending less at the supermarket than ever before: our expenditure on food is 14 per cent of household income, down from 22 per cent in the 1960s. The declining price of agricultural products is the main reason why agriculture's share of the economy has dropped from 14 per cent in the 1960s to 4 per cent.
But this cheap food has come at a cost, one ignored by Rudd, but tallied on the livelihoods of Australian farmers and on the degradation of the Australian environment.
In his recent book, The House on the Hill: The Transformation of Australia's Farming Communities, social researcher Neil Barr describes the bleak future facing independent farms and the country town connected to them. The core of his pessimism is declining commodity prices.
Barr grew up on a small, struggling stone-fruit orchard outside Melbourne. He uses his parents' experience as an illustration: when they bought a farm in 1953, ten acres of productive orchard was sufficient to earn a reasonable family living. The falling price of fruit and the rising cost of growing it meant that before too long the amount of land required to make an income rose to 15 acres. It kept rising. Barr's parents gave up when it reached 30.
'Get big or get out' has become a truism of modern farming: if farmers survive it is by buying out their failing neighbours. Only one in two farming families will pass the business on to a successor within the family.
Falling food prices and farm aggregation are both cause and effect in a complex network of changes that have transformed Australian agriculture. These range from the triumph of global trade over national schemes of price fixing and controlled production, to the impact that women entering the paid workforce has had on the way Australians eat.