Member-only story
Farmers Are Going Broke While You Pay Record Prices
Someone’s making a killing in the middle. Here’s who’s destroying both ends of the food chain
Stand in any supermarket aisle in America today and perform a small act of arithmetic. A loaf of bread. A pound of ground beef. A dozen eggs. Add them up. Now remember what you paid for the same items in 2020. Grocery prices have risen nearly 30% since the start of 2020. That number isn’t a weather event. It isn’t a pandemic ghost. It is the compounded return on decades of decisions made in boardrooms, lobbying suites, and legislative chambers. Decisions that were never made with you in mind.
We have been told a story about why food costs so much. The story involves supply chains and COVID shocks and droughts and diesel prices and the inexorable logic of the market. Some of that is true. But “the grocery sector has seen price increases that go beyond what inflation alone can explain,” according to the Center for Responsible Food Business.
The rest of the story — the part that explains that gap — involves something far more deliberate: the quiet, methodical consolidation of American food into the hands of a very few, and those few using their power in ways that would make the robber barons blush.
