Rising Food Costs In Texas A Pandemic On Its Own.

We keep hearing about the country going into a depression. Not quite like The Great Depression, but definitely heading in that direction. Truthfully, it's been heading there since COVID attacked the entire world.

Life was seemingly good through COVID as the government was hooking everyone up with payments to help get everyone through it. A lot of people lost their job, some couldn't work because basically every retail establishment had to shut its doors.

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Now we're obviously back up to full speed at this point, COVID is almost an afterthought in that sense. However, the supply chain is still a mess and we've got a shortage of many items we took for granted. Now, we're paying for them...literally.

No doubt you've noticed the price of food has dramatically increased. I personally used to be able to spend around $200 on a grocery shopping trip and that would cover my entire family for two weeks. Now, it's more like a week's worth of groceries, and we're having to find cheaper meals to make just to keep our costs down.

Every month, there seem to be some food items that rise in price from where they previously were. So which food items have risen the most in the last month? Some of it you already know about, some of it was probably seasonal, and some of it is related to another item on the list. Here are just a few that showed dramatic rises in the last month and year in Texas.

HAM

This checked in as the 13th-highest rise in cost this past month as prices on ham rose by 0.3% this month, but that is probably in relation to Easter as a lot of families cook ham for the holiday. However, the increase in the price of ham is up nearly 10% year over year, so the uptick has been trending that way for a while now.

POTATO CHIPS

This has been one of the most noticeable changes in the price of any food item if you ask me. Look, I LOVE chips, eat them like crazy. It wasn't long ago that you could grab a full bag for under $3. Now? You're looking at roughly $6 per bag here in the panhandle, and I'm now only buying them when I can find a deal on buying multiple bags at United or Market Street.

Potato chips jumped ANOTHER 1% in price this past month, and that's on top of the 20% rise in bags of chips over the last year. There is a reason for the jump though, and we'll get to that here shortly.

GROUND BEEF

It's one of the most universal meats we've got. You can use ground beef for SO many things, making it one of the most popular items to purchase at a grocery store. Well, this month, it was a little more expensive to purchase as the cost of ground beef rose just shy of 2% this past month. It's only up 0.1% over the past year, so the price has held pretty steady, but this month that jump was probably felt by you.

ALL-PURPOSE WHITE FLOUR

One way many people have circumvented the rising cost of things is to start making things from scratch. It's a bit more time-consuming, but cheaper in the long run as you can get a lot more out of making stuff from scratch a lot of the time.

An item you need to make a lot of those things is flour, and because of that, a lot of people are purchasing it. This month, the cost of making things yourself or baking things got a bit more expensive as the cost of all-purpose white flour jumped a staggering 3.5%. We don't have the year-over-year data on it, but that's a pretty big jump for an item that typically isn't expensive.

WHITE POTATOES

Remember how I said the cost of potato chips jumping had a direct correlation? Here it is. White potatoes have risen dramatically over the past year as the cost of them is up over 20%, but they jumped again this past month by a whopping 5.4%. Potatoes used to be one of the cheapest foods you could buy, and now they're almost becoming a luxury, especially in the world of chips.

There are quite a few other items on the list and you can see them all here.