Getting costlier to eat at home

Summer usually means relaxation, casual living, vacations - and maybe eating out at restaurants instead of firing up the backyard grill.

The reason: prices.

The cost of what the government calls "food at home" rose far more rapidly this spring in the Philadelphia area than "food away from home."

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the region's price of eating at home was up 2.9 percent in the May-June period. Among the culprits were milk, breakfast cereals, and a variety of other grocery goods.

Prices for food away from home increased just 0.6 percent in the same period.

Over the last year, overall area food prices increased at the fastest pace since December 2008: 4.5 percent at home and 2.3 percent away from home, for a combined rise of 3.5 percent, the bureau said.

The 12-month increases closely mirror the national pattern, the BLS report showed, and reflect higher prices for such commodities as corn, a key livestock feed ingredient. Among the increases nationally were for bakery products and coffee.

A possible explanation for the difference in the price changes for food at home compared with eating out is that, in a struggling economy, restaurants may be more reluctant than supermarkets to pass along their own cost increases to customers. That's because eating out is generally discretionary. A sign of that reluctance: Wendy's, the fast-food chain, in May warned that its 2011 profit margin might decline because of higher commodity costs.

The food costs were contained in the bureau's nationwide inflation report for June, which showed that overall U.S. consumer prices fell last month for the first time in a year because of the biggest drop in gas costs in two years.

The national Consumer Price Index dropped 0.2 percent in June, the BLS said. Gas prices fell 6.8 percent. In the Philadelphia-area, overall consumer prices rose 0.6 percent in the May-June period - even as energy prices fell 0.7 percent, a sign of the recent drop in the cost of crude oil.