Food

The consumer price index (CPI) is an economic tracking device that measures price changes of various baskets of consumer goods usually deemed to be necessities of life. You have baskets (if it were literally possible) of housing, petrol and of course food.

Of course the CPI is a basket of shit due to the mammoth task it represents for economists to decide what is and isn't in the basket. For example, in the 1920's it might have been reasonable to include a tin of dripping in the basket of food, something that probably isn't applicable now. In what year do you sub in margerine? All of that.

Furthermore, John Howard could go and say 'take Consumer Credit Card debt out of the CPI' so that inflation can drop from 5% to 4% because a politician wants to remove one of the most relevant new expenses of current lifestyles in order to downplay it.

In short it's not really objective.

Now performance gauge 1 of any investment choice is 'does it beet inflation' most common example being stick your money in an ordinary savings account for 2.5% interest per year and inflation is running at 4% you have lost 1.5% of your purchasing power by saving money that way.

Except we know the CPI giving us 4% isn't that reliable. Anyway to make a long story short, I believe it isn't out of the realm of possibility for people to just track their own inflation using net based bots. It will give you a much more reliable performance target to judge your wealth by, especially with the advent of coles online and whatnot.

An easy example for me is petrol. Petrol get's lumped into the total CPI figure because the assumption is that most Australians drive cars. My total expenditure on petrol in the past 3 years has been approximately $20. What do I give a fuck about price changes in petrol? Sure in the future it may be foreseeable that I need a car for some reason but right now it's not something that effects my investment performance because it just isn't an expense.

So the CPI including Petrol, Credit Cards, Car insurance etc. isn't relevant to my lifestyle.

What then of the food basket?

Well I haven't calculated the inflations but over the past few months of being the primary chef in the house along with my sister I'm beginning to figure out the list of staples that I would just constantly buy in order to make dishes of taste for me.

Here's my list in no particular order:

Garlic - I feel I need garlic every time there is less than two bulbs. It goes in almost every dish I make, bar the chicken ones which I don't make that often or if I'm cooking snags, which just stands to reason.

Potatoes - I am a white person.

Butter - I have discovered the secret to a lot of 'fancy cooking' is to stop using the emulsified horse piss that is margerine and substitute it with dairy based products like butter. Butter goes a long way though your standard 250g block would easily last me a month.

Peanut Oil - low viscosity, good for cooking.

Olive Oil - high viscosity, not so good for cooking but good in marinades, dressings and shite and inevitably I end up using it for cooking some dishes, usually the saucier ones.

BBQ Sauce - I never use sugar in my cooking, I use one of two substitutes (and occasionally both) substitute numero uno is BBQ sauce. Almost any brand will do. It is also my universal cover up condiment, any dish I ruin can be fixed with BBQ sauce. If you apply BBQ sauce directly to any dish that isn't a snag you have admitted defeat.

Honey - My other sugar substitute, and probably a more impressive and socially acceptable one. I use it less often because cooking with honey (particularly bbqing) makes a real fucking mess. And although I benefit from, I don't endorse the notion that the cook doesn't do the dishes for the simple reason that the cook is the one that determines how big a mess they make, so washing the dishes is a good incentive for the cook to keep it simple.

Salt & Pepper - not mixed together, but for seasoning. A good place to start with cooking is just cooking some meat and learning how to use salt and pepper and appreciating the flavour that is there to begin with. Then get fancy.

Basil - Good for almost anything.

Corriander - Good for asiatic dishes and again on almost anything.

Rosemary - Essential for lamb.

Lemon - along with garlic its what I use the most and never seem to have enough on. I use it on everything from pancakes to meatball casseroles. Not a fan of limes for some reason, I am loyal to lemons all the way.

Vinegars Balsamic and Red Wine - I like the vinegar taste, I like my salad dressings on the acidic side, balsamic is the staple, red wine vinegar is for better cuts of meat or when I want a fruitier flavour. I would use about as much of this shite as I do the olive oils.

Onions - The most commonly eaten food in the world I am told.

Rice - I'll be honest I cook rissotto around twice a year and otherwise I don't care what rice I use. I'm a white person and though 'rice is nice' as the Bard once said I'm just not that fussy.

Flour - Good for pancakes, scones and dumplings. And weevils!

Meats - Perhaps the hardest to capture in a personalised CPI I like the povo cuts for the extra fat and just because I lean most towards eastern european cuisine and other peasant dishes. If you used Italy's economic performance through the ages as justification for lumping them into Eastern Europe then you'd pretty much have all my favorite cuisines covered. At any rate if I had to do my meat buying for a week it would typically include snags (I don't mind quality but keep it to simple beef), lamb(such as forequarter chops), rump steak, mince meat, chicken thigh. And otherwise I just grab whatever meat I need for mixing it up. It would be good if I could get more kangaroo but I need to do a lot more experimentation with that before I figure out how to cook it.

What about beer? I don't drink beer, but I do like to parboil sausages in a beer and onions mix, it can also be good in beer batters and for a very savoury rissotto a beer can be substituted for the white wine component just make sure you are still predominantly using stock.

And to be honest I can't believe how long that list is. I'm sure with just lemons, garlic, bbq sauce, butter, potato, rice and onions I could cook up good eating no matter what meat and veg you gave me but they have to go in there. At anyrate I think personalised CPI's are just one more evolution of economics that are necessary for a democratised world.
I will I swear one day figure out how to program such a bot, if there isn't one already going around in open source. It would just be great for all those petty arguments that would now go as thus:

'Only a 4% pay rise! That's barely inline with inflation.'
'Yeah but my CPI's only running 2% My wages are doubling the rate of inflation I'm experiencing.'

Which I think in past years has been true for me.