Eating out takes up nearly half of average household spending on food, research showed, reflecting the increase in dual-income families.

The cost of eating out took up 20 percent of total food spending in households up until 1990, but gradually increased and reached 44 percent in 2003, 45.2 percent in 2007 and 46.6 percent last year, according to a report by the Korea Rural Economic Institute on Thursday.

There was a significant gap between the rich and poor in terms of eating out ― the top 40 percent of households, in terms of income, spent an average 406,000 won per month eating out while the lower 40 percent spent only 178,000 won. Overall food consumption of the first group was nearly double (819,000 won) that of the latter (462,000 won).

Meanwhile, consumption of processed foodstuffs increased from 23.6 percent in 2003 to 25.4 percent last year while that of fresh ingredients decreased from 32.4 percent to 28 percent during the same period.

“Eating out frequently and consuming more meat can have a huge influence on food supply self-sufficiency as well as health,” said Hwang Yun-jae, a researcher at KREI.

Earlier this month, the central bank said the nation’s household consumption reached 324 trillion won ($297 billion) in the first six months of this year and spending on food and non-alcoholic beverages climbed 6.3 percent to 44 trillion won.

As a result, the Engel’s coefficient, a percentage of food consumption to total spending came to 13.6 percent, the highest since the first half of 2001, when the figure reached 14 percent.

By Park Min-young  (claire@heraldcorp.com)