After the United States saw record gas prices last month, consumers can also expect to pay more at the grocery store and dining out as food costs are expected to rise, the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts.
The USDA’s Food Price Outlook 2022, the agency’s Consumer Price Index for food which measures inflation, is up 7.9% from February 2021, the largest increase since May 1981.
In total, food prices at grocery stores and supermarkets are expected to increase 3%-4% this year after already seeing a 6.8% jump from January 2021.
Restaurant purchases are also 8.6% higher than in February 2021 and are expected to jump by 5.5%-6.5%.
“All food prices are now predicted to increase between 4.5 and 5.5%,” the USDA’s Economic Research Service explained in the March report. Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
The United States Department of Agriculture released an update to its Food Price Outlook for 2022 and found that nearly everything one might ingest – whether it comes from the grocery store or restaurant – is going up in price.
And yes, that’s on top of the price increases consumers have already been forced to endure in the last year.
“All food prices are now predicted to increase between 4.5 and 5.5%,” the USDA’s Economic Research Service explained in the March report.
FILE- Chickens follow Heather Retberg at her family’s farm, Sept. 17, 2021, in Penobscot, Maine. On Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021, Maine voters will decide whether to pass the nation’s first “right to food” constitutional amendment. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Maine voters passed the nation’s first “right to food” constitutional amendment on Tuesday.
A statewide referendum asked voters if they favored an amendment to the Maine Constitution “to declare that all individuals have a natural, inherent and unalienable right to grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume the food of their own choosing for their own nourishment, sustenance, bodily health and well-being.”
It was an experiment not tried before by any state.
This is probably a question that you might have heard once or twice in conversations: Did food taste better in the past? It’s one of those things that just kind of gets tossed around as common sense sometimes—the idea that food, and particularly produce, just isn’t like it used to be.
Unfortunately, we can’t go back in time and pluck a strawberry from a 1960s grocery store and compare it to one found in a supermarket today. Even if we could do that, it’s unlikely that everyone would agree that today’s strawberries are less flavorful than a fresh berry from decades ago.
In some ways, taste is pretty objective. There are currently five recognized kinds of taste—sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. When we eat food, various receptors (otherwise known as taste buds) react to those tastes and send a signal to the brain telling us what’s going on. But, in other ways, taste can be perplexingly subjective.
Certain types of health conditions can impair your sense of taste, as can your mood, along with plenty of other environmental and genetic factors. For example, some people are more sensitive to bitter tastes, making foods that are particularly bitter less palatable. And this is often because of their genetics: Some folks who are more sensitive to bitter flavors—often dubbed supertasters—have a gene named TAS2R38, which heightens their perception of bitterness.
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