I'm going to try to answer this question as an economic historian (I'm not, I hate numbers ... but I like a challenge, so I'm going to challenge myself.) I'm about to regurgitate so many statistics at you, you're going to feel like a baby robin whose mother ate an almanac.

The U.S. government keeps darn good track of retail prices for a variety of reasons. In modern times, one of the better sources is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey. The U.S. Census also keeps wonderful data on retail prices.

Let's start by looking at Bureau of Labor Statistics Report 991, better known as "100 Years of U.S. Consumer Spending." This paper analyzed the expenditure surveys for New York City, Boston and the rest of the country during the 20th century. We have pretty darn good records for Boston and NYC because they were big even at the start of the 20th century.

But you're not interested in the whole century, so let's look at the sections of this paper that discuss the situation in 1950 and compare it to 1934-36. It's only 14 years, but there's a world of difference between these two periods:

"[In 1950,] retail food prices had risen sharply from 1934–36 levels. The price of a pound of butter had doubled, from 32 cents to 73 cents. Meat prices also had risen sharply, with a pound of round steak increasing from 28 cents to 94 cents and pork chops from 26 cents to 75 cents per pound.

The average U.S. family’s income of $4,237 had increased by 178.0 percent since 1934–36. As for income distribution, 53.4 percent of U.S. families had incomes less than $5,000, with 25.0 percent earning less than $3,000. The median family income was $3,216. Average family expenditures during the same timeframe had increased 151.9 percent, to $3,808. This amount would have purchased $2,171 worth of goods and services in 1935 dollars, reflecting inflationary forces."

OK. So why is this section important? If you look at just the numbers, you'll see that everything is more expensive and think "whoa, there must have been shortages." Remember your economics 101 and supply/demand. If demand rises and supply stays flat, prices rise. If supply falls and demand stays the same, prices rise, too.

But what's happening here is something different: inflation. Notice that incomes have almost tripled. In the same time, food prices haven't gone up as much. This is more apparent if you look at a breakdown of retail prices of selected foods.

In that chart I've linked, you can see 5 pounds of flour is 23.8 cents in 1936 but 49.1 cents in 1950. That's a steep increase -- more than double -- but remember, wages have increased much more than that. If supply was keeping up with demand, the increases would be in step. Here, the increase is less than wages, proportionally, so you know that supply is more than keeping up with demand.

Let's look at milk. In 1936, a half-gallon of milk (delivered) is 24 cents. In 1950, it's 41.2 cents. Now you've really got an imbalance. Prices haven't even increased 100 percent. Wages are really outpacing inflation. Look at butter, and you'll see the same thing: 39.5 cents per pounds in 1936 and 72.9 cents per pound in 1950.

Why is the increase so much less than with flour? Refrigeration. When it comes to spoilable products, you see a huge increase in production and consumption. Thanks to refrigerated rail cars moving refrigerated product to refrigerated stores and then on to refrigerated homes, spoilage is cut down and production rises.

Meat's a trickier situation: It took time for supply to rise to meet meat demand. Prices were initially disproportionately high, but today they're disproportionately low. Let's go back to the BLS paper for our conclusion:

"Food, clothing, and housing accounted for 68.4 percent of total spending [in 1950], a decrease from their combined share in 1934–36. The share for food, 29.7 percent and the single largest expenditure category, was less than the 1934–36 allotment.

The average American in 1950 consumed 3,260 calories per day compared with 3,250 calories a day in 1934–36, although individuals consumed 12.6 percent more food in 1950. During the Depression, the American diet was high in calories. By the 1950s, a greater selection of foods and widespread use of refrigeration had contributed to a change in dietary habits."

Ok, I have limited time, but this is my THING. Unfortunately, I am on vaca, so I do not have access to all the fine facts and statistics I might otherwise have, were I not snowed into a cabin on a high mountain-top with basically just my laptop.

Quick cultural points to round out a fine economic, statistic-ridden analysis by /u/The_Alaskan:

• In the depression, there was a glut of wheat and other mass agricultural commodities which sank in price, so farmers planted/produced more to try and break even, which further depressed the price, and so on. This is why in depression-era cheap foods were sometimes new creations based on the current glut: macaroni and cheese was invented and touted as a great penny-saver because it used two over-produced ingredients: cheese (a stable way to sell milk without it going bad in a week) and wheat. Food historian Harvey Levenshtein credits the ingenuity and good luck of the Italian-AMerican community combining with the particular circumstances of the depression for the rise in acceptability - indeed, popularity - of Italian American foods, such as pizza and spaghetti, which had previously been seen as gross, un-American food compared to good old meat, potatoes, and some sort of boiled greens. So, in short, American meat consumption declined, carb consumption increased, and high-value, high-cost to transport fruit and vegetable intake declined.
• In the wartime, these exact same foods that Americans had been working to eat in bulk, plus meat and dairy and eggs, were exactly what commanded the highest price abroad. Before America even entered the war, they started offloading the surpluses of these products to support Allied nations - especially poor island-bound Britain, which was importing 70% of its food supplies at the start of the war (a percentage that would only increase, despite intensive cultivation efforts). The U.S. even invented new technologies to help these foods cross the ocean safely, including dehydrated milk and powdered eggs. And yes, I am arguing that economics as much or more than ideology or cultural allegiances fostered the US lend-lease act and involvement in the war; Herbert Hoover made his political career by turning a profit of 50 MILLION dollars on our "foreign food aid" programs in the first World War (hardly philanthropic with profit margins that high!); US strategists figured the same principles would work again. As history shows, the US did emerge from World War II the predominant world superpower in large part because the rest of the world was in debt to us for war supplies. This included tanks, machinery, and ammunition of course, but the material that countries continued to depend on the US for well after the cessation of hostilities was FOOD.
• When rationing came with the US entry into war, it was not because we had ANY food shortages. On the contrary, in the pursuit of more money from desperate Allied nations, the government ironically rationed some of the products we had in highest supply, because they would fetch the most on the world market. US farmers broke national food production records for three consecutive years in a row, in fact (1940, 41, 42)! Furthermore, in 1943, 40% of the fresh produce Americans ate came not from these hyper-productive farmers, but from Victory Gardens that they grew themselves! Americans went back to espousing "Wheatless Wednesdays" and "Meatless Mondays" as their average vegetable intake actually increased over the course of the war -- shockingly enough, so did the average American meat consumption, despite rationing and despite all their moaning and groaning. (Here is where I only WISH I had my files to illustrate this with concrete statistics, but I would rather not hazard a guess and potentially mislead you.) I'm having trouble googling the quote, but economist John Kenneth Galbraith who served as Deputy Head of the Office of Price Administration (in charge of rationing) in World War II has an apt quote to the effect of "Never in history have so many spoken so much of sacrifice while enjoying so much material wealth as America in World War II."
• The chains by which food reached the home changed too - Tracey Deutsch details how World War II rationing, simply because of all the red tape, served to favor large grocery chains and supermarkets over small, local grocery stores. Americans started embracing self-serve meat departments over neighborhood butchers and used shopping carts rather than home-delivery services. All part of the rhetoric of sacrifice, and all part of the new consumption paradigm that would come to typify suburban life in the postwar world.

(MOST IMPORTANT) SOURCES

Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife’s Paradise : Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (New York: Penguin Press, 2012).

Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory : Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

Harvey A Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Thank you to all for a most illuminating discussion!