You may not know much about porcine epidemic diarrhea (except that it sounds horrible), but it’s costing you money at the grocery store. The disease has killed millions of piglets and young hogs and driven up pork prices in its wake.

Not a bacon eater? A plant disease known as “citrus greening” is taking out orange and grapefruit trees in Florida.

Not to mention a drought in cattle country that’s contributed to the rising price of beef. And even coffee rust in Central America could lead to a jump in how much a cup of java costs.

These days, food costs are one of the biggest sources of the average American’s financial frustration. Who hasn’t grimaced at the total of a supermarket receipt?

But despite rising prices, U.S. consumers spend less on groceries as a percentage of disposable income than people anywhere else in the world, according to the USDA, which keeps track of food expenditures around the world. Americans spend around 6.6% of their income on food. Let’s compare that to Pakistan, where the average consumer spends 47% on food.

Noel King of Marketplace’s Wealth & Poverty Desk reported on this today:

The reason people in Pakistan and Kenya spend nearly half of their disposable incomes on food — is that their incomes are low compared to your average American.

But Americans ALSO spend less on food than people in higher-income countries like Germany, Sweden and France.

Some of this is just common sense math, says Anne-Marie Kuhns, of the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.

King spoke with Dan Bossey, president of the consulting firm AgResource Company. Bossey says a couple of factors decrease the price of food in the U.S. — like land:

America is blessed with a tremendous amount of farmland. Estimated somewhere around 350 million acres.

Scientific advances — like chemical and seed production — also affect how much we pay for what we consume. Bossey says production using methods like genetically modified plants are largely restricted in Europe.

Timothy Richards, a professor of Agribusiness at Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business, talked to King about the different quality standards held by Europeans when it comes to food:

Consumers take their food a lot more seriously in Europe then we do here. They’re more likely to buy higher end things. Here, Walmart is the dominant food supplier because it’s cheap.

And while food is always susceptible to price hikes, Americans unwittingly control food prices by eating a varied diet, according to the USDA’s Anne Marie Kuhns. She told King:

When the price of a particular good, say beef, becomes more expensive in the grocery store, we’re more able to easily shift our consumption to cheaper forms of protein.

Like chicken or tofu.

Interestingly, the national poverty line still assumes we spend 33% of our income on food. A previous story by King explains why so many of our country’s financial safety net programs are still based on outdated assumptions:

Talk to us:

Are you surprised to learn Americans spend the least on food of any country in the world? Do you feel financially squeezed when buying food? What measures do you take to sticking to a food budget?

Keep reading:

Vox has some beautiful graphs charting food expenditures around the world here.