The American Farm Bureau gladdens the hearts of ideas-strapped journalists every November by calculating the cost of a classic Thanksgiving dinner. This year’s reckoning shows the price up by a very reasonable 28 cents or 0.6% from last year: the turkey was more expensive but most of the other ingredients were cheaper.

Now, here’s the thing. Despite all the dire talk of food price shocks and drought in the Midwest and the newly meat-chomping Chinese and so on, the Thanksgiving dinner has not risen much in real terms since the global food price crisis in 2007-2008 and has been pretty stable for two decades. Read more