If you haven't checked food prices lately, they're sneaking up behind you

My dad tells me a story.

He's always told stories. Not the guilt-laden whoppers a father tells a daughter ("Sorry I couldn't make the violin recital, Kiddo, but the lawn...") or the falsehoods a spouse contrives to stitch together an unraveling marriage ("Yeah, I'm late again. Okay, so it's 2 a.m. But just imagine the overtime pay").

When I was a child, Dad told me about Tobias, the monster who lived in our basement and feasted on naughty children. Yeah, I know. Today's PC parent would never freight his child's ego with basement terrors. But my sister and I understood his stories were in good fun. Dad would gnash his teeth and claw the air, thump his feet on the ground to mimic Tobias' dread footfall on the stairs. Clomp-clomp-CLOMP.

As children, we loved the thrill of small terrors.

But the story Dad tells me today relates terrors on a more human, more adult scale. We are in the realm of everyday, not fantasy -- and I see it playing out where I live, in the present day.

"I remember Pops coming home and Mom just looking at him," Dad says. "Even as a little boy I knew what it meant when Pops shook his head. He hadn't gotten the job. I must have been 3, but I knew how frightened my mother was."

They were in the depths of the Great Depression. Grandpa was out of work, with odd jobs here and there, but not enough to build a dream on. Somehow, they kept body and bone together.

You probably think I want to hearken back to our late recession as it relates to the Depression. Nah. Or maybe I want to agonize over unemployment figures. Nah.

Instead, I want to mull over one of those essentials of human survival: food. Because it seems to me that in the Great Depression folks like my grandparents didn't have bankable income but they always found something to eat. They must have, or I wouldn't be here.

From what I gather, Dad's parents didn't patronize soup kitchens or rely on the kindness of strangers. They planted, cultivated, harvested and canned. They were do-it-yourselfers, green thumbs with a backyard garden and cases of Mason jars. And this at a time when grocery store prices, comparatively, weren't engineered to pick your pocket.

But have you seen the price of an avocado lately? Or of a pint of blueberries? I could tell you stories. People moan about sticker shock at the pump, but what about the humble gallon of milk? Catch me before I faint.

Skyrocketing food bills encouraged me to do a little investigating. I came up with phrases like "consumer price index" and "food index." I noted alarmist reports about the growing demand for meat in China, crop failures in Mexico and the Southwest, food prices outpacing inflation and schemes by California avocado growers to keep Mexico out of the U.S. market. This stuff was grimmer than a Grimm Brothers' fairy tale -- the unedited version.

I don't know where the reports stand on the continuum from fact to fiction. But what I do know is that every time I hit the grocery store these days, I hear a familiar clomp-clomp-CLOMP at my back. I look behind. "Is that you, Tobias?" I say. But no one's there. Because the noise trip-trapping after me is my heart clamoring over another price hike: "Two dollars for a freaking bell pepper? You gotta be kidding me."

One website suggested I avoid high-priced food items. That pretty much rules out anything grown on a tree or plucked from the earth. Hello, Coca-Cola and Velveeta cheese. That's an exaggeration, but not by much.

I'm just thinking that maybe it's time I planted a garden and got that monster off my back.

----

Britt Aamodt is a print and radio journalist, and the author of "Superheroes, Strip Artists, & Talking Animals." She is a source in MPR's Public Insight Network.

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