The food-system card at the household layer, published on Deer Park's page because the household is not a jurisdiction of its own and has no namespace to be filed under. It states this jurisdiction's standing commitments to the food system, in the record's own terms, and reduces them to a measure that reads the same at every layer above and below it — so the same question can be asked of Earth, the nation, the state, the county, the city and the household without changing the instrument.

At the household layer the federal statistics run out. There is no national series for what a family here actually pays to eat, so this layer is measured from a fixed basket, priced from institutional series and frozen so it cannot drift. The basket is one adult day — ten staples across breakfast, lunch, dinner and two snacks, at roughly the calories an adult actually eats.

There is no coffee line, and that is deliberate. Dropped — South-region series stale since 2025-09derived — Council on Local Relations, Real-Life Data Co-op — Step 0 re A basket is dated by its stalest cell, so carrying a price last published in September 2025 would have dated this entire day to then. The current national coffee price was not substituted into a regional slot to fill the gap — that would make the basket's provenance a lie for the sake of a tidier table.

Technical: The composition is frozen and versioned: no substitution and no quality adjustment, ever. This day is basket v4; the single breakfast the card carried before it is basket v1, still frozen, still published, never edited. A change is always a new version. That is the whole integrity claim, and it is what lets these figures sit beside the official index without needing to say anything about it.

$ / meal and $ / calorie. One adult day of food costs $6.0484source addedderived — Council on Local Relations, Real-Life Data Co-op — cost.fci_as of 2026-06-01 and carries 1991 kcal†correctedderived — Series title — $3.0379 per 1,000 kcal†correctedderived — Series titleas of 2026-06-01, or $2.0161†correctedderived — The day basket (items, amounts and prices) averaged across three meals.

The single breakfast this card measured first — two eggs and eight fluid ounces of milk — is still frozen and still published, at $0.6178derived — South region, 2026-07-01. It is a cheaper thousand calories than the day is, which is what a basket that cannot substitute is for: the day includes meat, produce and coffee's absence, and it costs what it costs.

In hours of work. The point of a fixed basket is to price it against something that does not move, and the steadiest thing a household has is its own labor. A day of food costs 15.3 minutes†correctedderived — The day basket (items, amounts and prices) at the wage half of Houston-area workers earn more than and half less ($23.76/hourarea 26420as of 2026-08-30).

Three levels rather than one, deliberately. A single average wage would say this day costs about eleven minutes and would be arithmetically true and practically false for most of the county — the average sits well above the median because high earners pull it there. The same groceries are two and a half times as much of the lowest-paid tenth's day as of the average earner's. That spread is the finding; the card states it and stops.

Southern U.S. regional average (BLS), not local store prices. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes average prices only down to the region — asked for a metro-level series, it answers that the series does not exist. So every price above is the South-region average for the month shown beside it, priced against the standard Texas basket (ten staples the Council ratified as the standard for every Texas town). The same day at the US city average is $6.1916†correctedderived — Same frozen basket and dates, priced at BLS US city average., published here so the gap is visible rather than assumed away.

Technical: Calories are USDA FoodData Central reference values, converted to each item's priced unit and frozen into the basket version alongside its composition. They are constants, not observations, and they never enter the price ledger. The day's total is a rough 2,000-calorie anchor, not a dietary recommendation — this is a price instrument.

Three things about this figure are open, and are stated here rather than left for a reader to discover:

• The breakfast figure was checked against a real receipt; the day figure has not been. The single-breakfast basket was compared against what a household here actually pays before it was published. The day basket is eight staples wider, priced from the same institutional series by the same arithmetic, but nobody has yet walked it through a store. That distinction is recorded rather than smoothed over.
• The wages are a year older than the groceries. The wage band comes from an annual survey with a May 2025 reference date; the prices are from 2026. Wages have not stood still in between, so the minutes above are, if anything, a little high. The two vintages are stated rather than quietly aligned, and the band moves when the next annual release lands.
• Only institutional sources are in this basket. Local store prices, the thing a household actually pays, are not here yet. That is the next layer, and it needs a way for a price to arrive with proof attached.

The section above measures what food costs here. This one records what is here: who sells food grown nearby, and who can process it. Both halves come from federal directories a resident can open, and both are counted the same way — by distance from Deer Park City Hall.

What the federal directories list inside Deer Park. None7,148 / 2,002 / 480 / 4,692 national recordsas of 2026-08-31 — not one farmers market, CSA, food hub or on-farm market carries a 77536 address. The single USDA local-food listing at a Deer Park address is Derrick's Christmas Trees, 4711 Center St - an agritourism listing, not a food sourceUSDA Local Food Directories (Agricultural Marketing Service) — recorded here because it is what the directory holds, and labelled because it is not food.

These directories are self-registered, and that changes what the zero means. A market that never filed with USDA does not appear in them. So the row above is a fact about the federal record, not a census of the town: it says nobody registered, which is not the same as saying nobody is there.

Deer Park sits beside one of the largest food-handling corridors in the country, and the federal inspection record shows it: 7329.7055, -95.1238as of 2026-08-31 federally inspected meat, poultry and egg establishments lie within thirty miles. In Deer Park itself, the record shows One - SFC Global Supply Chain, Inc. (M5630D+P5630D), meat and poultry PROCESSING, no slaughterUSDA FSIS Meat, Poultry and Egg Product Inspection (MPI) dir.

But almost none of it is a kill step. Of those establishments, only 25.5 mi, FSIS size class 'Very Small' can slaughter — and both sit in the smallest size class the inspection service uses. Meanwhile 11 of the 73 are imported-product establishments, and 21 carry export-certification, identification or off-premise-freezing activitiesUSDA FSIS Meat, Poultry and Egg Product Inspection (MPI) dir. That is the shape of the thing: dense capacity for food moving through the ship channel, thin capacity for food raised nearby.

Two gaps follow from the rows above. They are stated as gaps in a public record — not as business advice, and not as a claim that anyone should fill them.

Each is derived, and each shows its arithmetic in the Sources table below: the operands are the directory rows above, and the comparison is ours.

What this record cannot say. Partial. The record can show that nearby federally inspected capacity is weighted toward port import, cold storage and export certification rather than local slaughter and aggregation. It cannot put a number on how much of Deer Park's food is imported.derived — Council on Local Relations (computed)

Technical: Every distance on this card is computed by the Council, not read from the directory. The USDA local-food portal's search endpoint ignores its own location parameter — a query for 77536 returns the whole national list, first record Baxter, Minnesota — so each listing's own published coordinates were measured against Deer Park City Hall (29.7055, -95.1238) instead. One on-farm listing was dropped for a coordinate that contradicts its own address; the exclusion is recorded in that row's locator rather than made silently.

The food-system ladder: Earth → Nation → State → County → City → Household. The same card, the same question, one layer at a time.

• ↑ Harris Countynot yet built — the layer above
• ↓ the householdyou are reading it — measured here, on this page.

Every figure on this card, with the source it came from, the locator that opens it, and the date it was retrieved. You will almost certainly never check. But you could.