Last year was not a great year for breakfast.
The myth that it is the most important meal of the day was finally and universally debunked, revealed to be the handiwork of lobbyists on the payroll of cereal maker Kellogg’s. So it was a welcome boost on Thursday from Bloomberg, which published its Global City Breakfast Index, a measure of affordability gaps between cities around the world. According to the ranking, Abu Dhabi’s residents enjoy the most affordable breakfast in the world, with Dubai in fifth place.
Bloomberg compared the cost of standard breakfast items – one cup of whole milk, one egg, two slices of toast and a piece of fruit – to the average daily income of residents in 129 cities. This was based on market prices over the past 12 to 18 months from an online database, Numbeo.com.
The research concluded that residents in the emirate of Abu Dhabi pay less than 1 per cent of their daily income to eat breakfast. The items cost US$1.16 – 0.93 per cent of daily earnings of $125.37.
Nicole Adoranti, 36, of Canada, typically eats peanut butter on toast washed down with coffee. “I spend Dh9 on a loaf of bread, Dh30 on a pack of coffee beans that last two weeks and Dh20 on peanut butter that also lasts two weeks,” she said. “That’s like Dh5 per meal.”
Dubai ranked fifth most affordable at 1.15 per cent, with the average daily salary running about $111 and breakfast items costing a total of $1.27.
Thanks to an average daily income of $178.60, Zurich is number three on the list at 1.02 per cent, despite the high-price of fruit in Switzerland.
However, these staples are not eaten as the first meal of the day in many of the cities that were analysed. For instance, the Arab region’s largest city, Cairo, came in at 120th. The daily average income for a resident is $5.20, while these staples costs 35 US cents, or around 6.68 per cent of a day’s wages.
In Egypt, one of the most popular breakfast foods eaten is foul, a bean concoction, on balady bread, which can be purchased from a streetcar for less than 10 cents. This would be only 1.9 per cent of the Bloomberg-referenced daily income, putting Cairo on a par with Cape Town and Hamilton, Bermuda in joint 58th place.
Other Mena cities on the list include Doha (6), Riyadh (14), Kuwait City (23), Manama (55) and Beirut (97). Food items are a popular way to compare spending power around the world. The Big Mac index, for example, was created by The Economist newspaper in 1986 "as a lighthearted guide to whether currencies are at their correct level".
lgraves@thenational.ae
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