American Kitchen Tales
American groceries got expensive, and most of the advice about it is guesswork. This
site is an attempt to answer food-cost questions with actual numbers instead.
What we do here
Every article on this site starts with a question a shopper actually asks — which
protein gives you the most food per dollar, whether store brands really save what
people claim, how much a bag of thrown-out produce costs a household over a year
— and answers it using published price data rather than opinion.
We work from three main sources:
Every figure we publish names the series it came from. If you want to check our
math, you should be able to — and we’d rather you did.
Who writes it
American Kitchen Tales is written and published by Zouhair El Ammari.
My background is not culinary. It’s logistics and inventory control — several years
spent auditing stock, tracking goods in and out of warehouses, and reconciling what
a shipment was supposed to cost against what it actually cost. Food, from that side of
the counter, is a supply chain with a price attached to every step.
That’s the lens this site uses. I’m not going to tell you how to cook a roast. I’m going
to tell you what the roast costs, how that price has moved over the last five years,
and what you get per dollar compared to the alternatives.
I write about U.S. food prices because the U.S. publishes the most detailed public
price data of any country in the world — decades of it, item by item, free to anyone
who wants it. Almost nobody reads it. That’s the gap this site exists to fill.
What we don’t do
Nothing here is financial, nutritional, or medical advice. It’s price research, and it’s
meant to help you make your own decisions at the grocery store.
Get in touch
Corrections, data questions, story ideas, and partnership inquiries all go
to contact@americankitchentales.com. Details are on our contact page, and
our methodology page explains how we handle the numbers.
