... Couponing, comparison shopping and cutting back on favorite foods are new habits for Apral Jack and millions of other Americans as they absorb the biggest jump in grocery prices in a half-century. Buying food to eat at home has gotten 33% more expensive in U.S. cities since the beginning of 2019, according to government figures. In the 7 1/2 years before that, prices rose 6.4%. ...
More.
More than half of the 17 offenders are beef products.
In addition to the 9 beef products, also appearing are beer, wine, chocolate chip cookies, lettuce, tomatoes, white rice, coffee, and orange juice.
Most of the 46 foods tracked are priced near, if not at, their all-time highs in 1H2026, but inflation over time matters when evaluating what's what.
Fresh whole chicken, for example, remains a good value compared with beef.
100% ground beef purchased in the summer of 1984 for $1.31 per pound should cost about $4.22 per pound today, but in reality is about $6.78 on an average basis. You are paying a premium of 61% over inflation when you eat hamburger today.
One whole chicken, however, purchased at an average price of 66-cents per pound in the summer of 1980 should cost about $2.67 per pound today adjusted for inflation, but is only about $2.04. A year ago it was $2.06.
Smart shoppers choose the fricken chicken.
Commenters may like to draw a sharp distinction between overall and core and point to core as evidence that this is not so bad, but the thing is, both overall and core measures have been steadily rising since February.
Overall cpi inflation which includes food and energy bleeds into core eventually, because energy inflation drives up the cost of everything.
This is ugly and getting uglier.
The president has scored an own goal opening the Iran war without a plan to keep the oil flowing.
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| core not seasonally adjusted |
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| core seasonally adjusted |
We are so screwed, so to speak.
Hamburgers will never be cheap as long as Donald Trump is president.
Flesh-eating screwworm is confirmed in the U.S., officials say
... "The United States has defeated this pest before, and we will do it again," the USDA said.
... Dudley Hoskins, undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs at the USDA ... “USDA invested heavily in the tools needed to eliminate NWS ever since cases started increasing in Central America and Mexico,” Hoskins said. “The United States has defeated this pest before, and we will do it again.” ...
Confirmed screwworm case in Texas sends two biotech stocks higher
... regional director of the Federal Crop Agency ... “We just had a conditional use drug approved; U.S. producers can handle it.”
August 15, 2025:
... Washington has halted cattle imports from Mexico and invested millions in setting up a new sterile fly production plant in Metapa, Mexico. But it will take roughly a year to come online.
... The U.S. eliminated screwworms in the 20th century by flying planes over hotspots to drop red-striped boxes packed with sterile flies, sometimes called “cupcakes” by ranchers. The USDA constructed a fly production plant in Mission, Texas, in 1962, that pumped out 96 trillion flies until it was decommissioned in 1981. Now the USDA is planning to resurrect the plant to disperse sterile flies, while Texas officials have scattered 100 screwworm traps along the border.
USDA inspectors known as Tick Riders who patrol the border on horseback to guard against another pest, the cattle fever tick, have also been tasked with conducting screwworm preventive treatment for all cattle and horses they find in the border area.
At the heart of the problem is an unworkable math equation. The USDA estimated 500 million flies need to be released weekly to push the fly back to the Darien Gap. At its maximum, the Panama plant produces just 100 million.
“It’s an overwhelming situation at this point,” Dr. Lansford said. “Screwworm is obviously doing well in Mexico, and they’re up against the same challenges we are.” ...
October 21, 2025:
... Moscamed, as the factory is called, will begin manufacturing 100 million sterile flies by July 2026. ...
Until now, the sterile flies that are spread throughout the country to combat the screwworm plague (100 million each week) are brought from a plant managed by the Panama-United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of the Cattle Screwworm (Copeg), in Panama, where they have been working at maximum capacity to control the pest since January 2025. ...
With the other leg of the project, the construction of a manufacturing plant for these flies in Texas, international efforts project a production of up to 500 million flies per week, which will be released throughout the region. If international cooperation continues, myiasis could be eradicated in less time than the first time. Some representatives of Senasica have even talked about achieving this goal in five years. ...
USDA didn't break ground on the Texas facility until two months ago.
April 17, 2026:
USDA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Break Ground on New Texas Sterile Fly Production Facility
... Initial operational capability targeted for November 2027, reaching production of 100 million sterile flies per week.
Construction continues immediately beyond initial operations to scale full production capacity to 300 million sterile flies per week. ...
This new state-of-the-art facility will complement USDA’s ongoing production of 100 million sterile flies per week at the Panama-based COPEG facility. USDA has also invested $21 million to support modernization of Mexico’s Metapa, MX facility, expected to be operational in summer 2026. ...
SPX +10.52% ytd
WTI +53.11% ytd
Meanwhile in April:
Hamburger +18.9% yoy
Coffee +29.0% yoy
Unleaded regular gasoline +28.0% yoy
Electricity +7.2% yoy
Natural gas +3.1% yoy
[Trump 9/21/2024: "We will cut your energy prices in half. Mark it down . . . within 12 months . . ."]
Milk +1.5% yoy
Whole Chicken -1.6% yoy
Eggs -56.1% yoy
Tomatoes +50.0% yoy
And:
30-year mortgage average monthly, above 6% since August 2022
Full time jobs above 50% of population just 6 of the last 25 quarters, all under Joe Biden
The sum of the average prices of five ingredients for your April 2018 BLT (bacon, lettuce, tomato, lightly toasted white bread in butter) is 86-cents less in April 2026 than it otherwise would have been if it had increased as much as overall inflation has increased, up 27% instead of 33%.
Don't spend it all in one place.
29.4% more is bad enough, right?
The ingredients for a traditional American breakfast in April 2026, adjusted for consumer price index inflation since October 2019, should cost $29.91.
Instead they cost $35.79, $23.11 plus 54.9%.
Menu: Bacon and eggs, whole wheat toast with butter, coffee with milk and sugar, and a glass of orange juice.
The Biden high for all this was $33.20 in January 2023.
The all-time high to date was in March 2025 under Trump at $37.67.
The April 2026 Trump price is still 7.8% higher than the Biden high three-plus years ago.
Frankly, most of the economic charts produced by the government do this kind of thing.
Most of the time the rich use this data to tell you how well things are going, when what they really mean is how well it's going for them.
It's an aggregate measure, so that the vast sums earned by the rich distort higher what's actually happening to the majority.
In the as-reported numbers at the time, everything actually went sideways for a time during the Great Recession and personal income actually fell, except that even that decline disappeared as the revisions to the data came in. The rich still made money in the Great Recession, enough to lift this aggregate measure ever higher right through the recession even as banks failed by the hundreds and millions lost their jobs and homes.
But the rich use this particular data set right now to tell you things like "you don't know how to shop" and "groceries have never been cheaper", you ignoramus.
They controlled roughly 60% of all income from 2020 to mid-2025, and the top 20% by wealth held nearly 72% of total household wealth as of Q4 2025.
The top 20% received roughly $14 trillion of the $23 trillion in this chart in March 2026, leaving the remaining $9 trillion, 40%, to be split by the 80%, the rest of us, however we must.
Rising prices of anything will naturally impact the 20% far less than the 80%.
It's another "let them eat cake" moment.
I coulda mentioned salad the other day, but I didn't.
The average price made a new record high in 1Q2026.
Why BLTs and salad just got more expensive — tariffs, war send tomato prices soaring
This story is about fresh tomatoes, not salad, and it is interesting, but the average price of tomatoes in 1Q2026 still hasn't surpassed 1Q2016.
Adjusted for inflation since 1Q1980, tomatoes could cost $2.64 per pound, but they were only $1.98 in 1Q.
As the story says, canned tomatoes are much cheaper. I make my sauce from stewed whole plum tomatoes from a can, preferably Italian, preferably San Marzano or Parma, but there are many acceptable American brands to choose from.
The ingredients in the data below come from the Gold Medal Flour Best-Ever Banana Bread recipe printed on the package, minus the (small amounts of):
vanilla (1 teaspoon), baking soda (1 teaspoon), salt (1 teaspoon), and the nuts (1 cup, optional anyway), for which I do not have the data.
Soaring coffee prices rewrite daily routines...
... Coffee prices in the U.S. were up 18.3% in January from a year ago, according to the latest Consumer Price Index released on Friday. Over five years, the government reported, coffee prices rose 47%. ...
100% ground beef hit a new all time high average price of $6.752/lb in Jan 2026.
