Americans learned Tuesday that they are richer. Not rich. Richer — the specific, hard-won wealth of a family discovering the turkey is down.

The American Farm Bureau Federation published its 40th annual Thanksgiving dinner survey, the longest-running measure of how much it costs to feed ten people the national meal, and the headline number is $55.18. That is the whole dinner: the turkey, the stuffing, the peas, the cranberries, the pie. Down 5 percent from last year. About $5.52 a person, which is less than most Americans spend to be seated in an airport.

1. THE GOOD NEWS

Markets correspondent types will tell you a 5 percent decline in a single meal’s cost is not a market event. They are incorrect. The survey is priced by volunteer shoppers in all fifty states and Puerto Rico, in stores and online, which makes it the only federal-grade economic indicator that has ever smelled like sage. Economists track inflation with a basket of goods. The Farm Bureau tracks one dinner. The dinner is winning.

2. THE STILL-EXISTING NEWS

The number is also higher than it was four years ago, and the survey says so, evenly, the way a doctor says it.

But four years is the past, and the past is where prices live that nobody can find anymore. The 2022 dinner — the fat one, the record one — is gone from the tables of the country, and in its place: $55.18, and turkey down 16 percent, mostly on holiday deals, which is what happens when every store in America tries to be the store you walk into.

THE NATIONAL BALANCE SHEET, PLATED

  • Total dinner, ten people: $55.18
  • Per person: $5.52, or roughly one stadium nacho
  • Change from last year: down 5 percent
  • Turkey: down 16 percent, the holiday deal doing the heavy lifting
  • Still above the levels of four years ago, stated here so the table stays honest
  • Survey age: 40 years, older than most supermarket loyalty programs

3. WHAT AMERICANS ARE CALLING IT

At a Kroger in Dayton, a shopper named Gail Pollock compared two turkeys by their price tags with the calm of a woman who has been tracking this her whole adult life. “Last year I said a prayer at the poultry case,” she said. “This year I compared the birds. That’s the recovery. A prayer became a comparison.”

Her cart held one turkey, in fact two, because a second was on clearance for the freezer, and Pollock is not about to let progress go to waste.

The survey is released every year in the weeks before the holiday, and every year someone asks what it predicts. It predicts nothing. It reports the weather after naming it. And this year it reported, in writing, with prices from Ohio: the meal is cheaper, the decline is the third in a row, and the country is one stretch of highway away from eating better than it did last November.

The survey does not address ham.