Potatoes, fruit and chicken a good buy

If you have been trying to keep your food bill down, figures from the Statistical Service suggest that the best bet over the past few years will have been a diet of chicken and potatoes followed by fruit, but you would have had to have passed on the traditional village salad of cucumbers and tomatoes.

The sharpest fall in the past three years of the foods items recorded was for chicken, down by 2.6% in three years (September 2003 to September 2006), while “fruits and other products” fell by 0.8%. The price of potatoes rose in the same period by only 1.1%.

At the high end, the price of cucumbers rose by an astonishing 69.9%, followed by pork meat, up 42.3%, fresh vegetables, up 30.5% and tomatoes up 19.7%.

Cow’s milk rose by 12.2%.

In the same period, the overall consumer price index rose by only 7.4%.

 

Fiona Mullen