The Aivian flu + inflation caused a carton of 18 eggs to increase in price more than 50% recently (<$5 to > $7.50).
My household has fought this increase by increasing mushrooms and spinach in our eggs, and recently hybridizing with liquid egg whites.
Yes, and food makes up ~13% of the BLS CPI. This is taken into account when they do their surveys to see what people are spending their money on:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Expenditure_Survey
Remember that the CPI is the national average inflation for an average basket of goods, and not your personal inflation. In Canada, StatCan actually has a personal CPI tool so that you can see how things are for your personal basket of goods:
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020015...
If the 60% increase in butter prices over the last year is hitting your budget, you probably would benefit from eating less butter. (And I say this as someone who eats a good amount of butter...)
The comment you replied to has the non-cherry-picked number for this month's report: "Food at home +0.2%"
Some things went up more than others, some recovered faster, and without deflation the prices will remain overall higher than they were a year ago.
And?
Food prices make up ~13% of the BLS CPI because, according to their surveys, that is what the national average is for an average basket of goods:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Expenditure_Survey
If you purchase more or less food than average, then your personal CPI will be different that the average that is reported in headlines. Further, the fact that you see some the price (inflation) in your face regularly is a form of cognitive bias:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attentional_bias
People noticed petrol prices go up and that inflation, but they're thinking less about the deflation of petrol going down, probably because they think the lower prices are "normal".
And when they do this, they compute that food-at-home rose 0.2% in December (2.4% annualized).
Every month for the last six months has produced the same comment. Overall inflation is low so somebody picks out a specific thing that went up a lot and implies that the government numbers are either misleading or lies. Interestingly, it is a different chosen product each month.
Egg prices are also being driven largely by disease and culling and don't really represent something that should be attacked with monetary policy.
I eat 3 eggs a day for breakfast, 4+ days a week for the last 25 years.
Most store-bought dried pasta has zero egg in it.
An entire homemade cake has like three eggs in it. So the price of an entire cake is up less than a dollar. How many cakes does the average household bake in a year?
Also, it seems pretty silly to talk about a dollar of extra cost as a problem in the context of making homemade pasta. Homemade pasta is a time intensive luxury.
