Food Prices Keep Going Up. The Impact May Be Felt Far Beyond the Supermarket.

An economic maelstrom is brewing. A few months ago, it cost Rachel Lee about $150 to buy two weeks of groceries for her family of four. Lately, she says, it takes almost $100 more to buy the same food. The 29-year-old mom in DeFuniak Springs, Fla., is cutting back on fresh produce and meat in exchange for less-nutritious but cheaper items while often unable to find inexpensive staples like pasta. She has started growing and canning some of her own food as it becomes harder to stretch her household’s income and ensure that her family has enough to eat. 

What is happening to the Lee family is playing out across America at a speed that is catching many households off-guard and at a magnitude that official metrics aren’t portraying. The 7.9% surge in total consumer prices last month from a year earlier marked a new 40-year high at a time when inflation-adjusted household incomes are falling at the fastest pace since the government began the data series in 1959. But the reality is much worse, and it is probably going to worsen still as the economic effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine play out. 

When you strip out everything but essentials—which is the opposite of what economists and policy makers do when they exclude food and energy prices to calculate so-called core inflation—the average change in those basic items rose more than 16% last month from a year earlier. In February from January alone, the month-over-month price change in those basics, including meat, bread, milk, shelter, gas, and utilities, rose 2.2%. For context, the Federal Reserve has long targeted a 2% annual inflation rate, which translates to a little less than 0.2% in month-over-month increases. Even then, some consumers say the price increases they are facing are far higher than what’s reflected in the consumer price index, a weighted average of goods and services across the country.