Why Are Grocery Store Prices So High

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To speak to someone in customer service, press 12, bakery, 13, Delhi or hot foods, 14, meet or see food 15. From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitro, this is the Daily. For a while now, my colleague, Daily Producer Jessica Chung, has been reporting on or trying to report on grocery prices. It's had a moment right now to talk about the kind of nature of shopping right now and why everything is so expensive.

That you would have to contact our corporate office for any information like that. It started after COVID when inflation and supply shortages and prices soaring. Then came Ukraine, tariffs and now the straight of hormones, which is push prices even higher. Service and president, not the latest inflation number, which is... No, I love Uber, I love Uber, I love Uber, I love Uber, I love Uber.

So she's been calling stores to talk about that. Trying to find a grocery store manager who could talk about how they and the people who shop in their store are dealing with round after round of rising food prices. And how high those prices could possibly go. And who would you recommend that I talk to at the corporate level?

Uh, Brad, talk to Brad. I was told that this is a number for Brad. He was an idiot in the moment. I could pick a message that he would get value because, uh, he'll call you back.

Okay, but a lot of the grocery stores she'd reached out to never got back to her.

And the big grocery chains refer to people far removed from the shelves. And it seemed like their job was to not answer her questions. I would love to, but unfortunately, I'm not allowed to. I'm not really allowed to say anything.

“You should be able to just email [email protected].”

You can always call 1-800-crovers. Your call is being transferred. [phone rings] But then, hello? She reached a small store.

And this one manager picked up the phone. Wonder if you'd be open to a conversation about that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I would love to. Great.

Today, we go to his grocery store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to finally get some answers.

It's Monday, July 13th. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a part of town called East 10, sits the aptly named East and food co-op. It's tucked away in a street without a lot of foot traffic. It's storefront as lined with grocery cards.

There's a display of leafy-potter herbs and organic seedless watermelons going for 1899. Like most food cooperatives, there is no CEO. There are no shareholders.

“It's owned by the very people who shop there.”

17,000 members. Though anyone off the street can buy their groceries here. That we're not getting there. With their back rings. On a Monday morning in the middle of June,

I walked into the produce section. I'm talking to shoppers about grocery prices. Okay, go ahead. It was not hard to get people to talk about prices and how high they are. You noticed grocery prices go up.

Almost definitely. To the extreme. Oh, it did. It's the meteoric in the way. Nasty.

It's so kind of, say, walking into the store sometimes. I've heard from everybody in my family that they're going up. And I bring Seth home this. This is outrageous. It's not just at this co-op.

It's everywhere. Prices are storing at unusually high rates. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics since 2020, grocery prices have climbed by nearly 30%. At a rate way faster than before the pandemic.

It's lettuce is $4. That seems like the lot. I would have expected, like, 2.90. Today, the price of watermelons is 18.99. I saw that out front.

I was surprised. I thought that was like a misprint. I just wish I could. Red pepper. Oh my God.

They're like almost $10 this morning. $10 for one. Yeah. For pound. They're one.

Okay, we're weighing it on the scale. It's almost a pound. So this is almost $10 for one red pepper. Just a few weeks ago, it was like 7 or 8. And over the winter, it was six.

And it just keeps going up.

Yes, steak. Steak. Beef. Beef.

You used to be like, you can get two nice days for about 20, 25 hours.

It's like 45 in up now. And is that your strip? T-bones. All kinds. All kinds.

Yeah. So I've been seeing the family size bag. I think it's like 7 or 8 bucks now. Mm-hmm. It's not a family size.

Not at all. It's chunk. And the price has gone up. Yep. I don't like to think about it because it's scary.

Yeah. So I don't think about it. So I don't think that much attention. But I'm trying to buy less. Yeah.

And then I don't really do a good job of calculating how much I'm spending.

“Now is that like a psychological defense mechanism?”

Right. Or is that? A little bit. I take this shopping. So I don't.

This is my worry pepper. Oh, this is kind of a stress ball. It's a form of a really pepper. Yeah. Have you noticed the rise in prices change your habits at all?

Like I've got less cheese. I'll get less meat. I'll get less chocolate. Designer ice cream. That's long gone.

What's the designer ice cream you like? Oh, well. The hugging does. I kind of stuff. Like the brand will be very crisp.

I don't see ice cream. Exactly. You don't need it. You don't need it. Let's see what we can prepare if we're buying.

Oh, no more basket. No more basket. What's your understanding of why this is happening? Yeah. My understanding of why is that.

Okay. This is such a big question that my mind is sort of shutting down in this moment. We should make this pay more. I don't know why the fish is so expensive. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Well, I haven't done the research, I guess, on to the details of the why. You know, I don't know exactly how, but I just know it is. I don't super follow the news. I can't really say why it's happening. When you see all these prices go up, does it raise any questions for you?

Yeah.

I always think like, what is this going to look like in five years?

Ten years. How does it affect our children? As shoppers, we know that a lot of factors go into the prices we see. But how many of us can need that? Eight hours.

Yes, that's nice to meet you. How's it going? Good, yeah, so far so good, you know, Monday morning.

“That's why I came here to talk to Tyler Cole put about.”

For nearly 12 years, he's been at Eastern Food Co-op, most recently as General Manager. And he's that one guy who picked up the phone. Growing season's impacted by climate change. Climate change. Tyler's 44 years old.

I'm like a lot of people in this part of town. He's got tattoos and it's a food lover. In fact, he's got a newsletter. Garlic and roses. All of those factors, and then he says yes.

Rising prices are driven by a bunch of factors. It's rising temperatures. It's supply chain issues. Because of the stuff in Iran, oil and fertilizer being trapped in the straight. So the latest reason for why prices have accelerated so much is the war in Iran.

At the time we talked. The US in Iran had reached an agreement to reopen the straight of her moves. But it was unclear what open meant how freely traffic would flows through the straight. Since then, the US in Iran have resumed fighting, even as the engaging peace talks. So the price of oil continues to yo-yo up and down.

And even if the price of oil manages to stay down, Tyler says shoppers won't be feeling a sense of relief anytime soon. But before I had him explain all of that, I'd be starting from an earlier stage. Like how did you know you wanted to go into the grocery store business?

I asked him how he became an exterer on this. My grandparents owned a basket robins.

“I didn't remember waiting on customers, scooping ice cream, making change.”

He grew up just a few hours east of here. As a literal kid in an ice cream store. I would have to put my whole body on the rim of the case. So I could balance, scoop ice cream, and I loved it. It was so much fun, and I loved it.

He liked talking to customers, studying what flavors people liked and what seasons. And then he grew to develop an interest in a pretty esoteric topic. Supply chains. Fascinated by the food supply chain and logistics of getting strawberries from Mexico or California to Pennsylvania in January or February.

It's tedious and unique, but I found it fascinating. So I paid attention. To be a grocery store manager, managing the margins of thousands of products on the shelves, is to be a statistician, a haggler, and also a culture anthropologist. People are more inclined to buy an item if there's three or five displayed in a line.

Like many other grocery store managers, Tyler's job is to drive sales. To do that, he's a hand in designing the whole experience a shopper's have. Down to all the little details.

There's lots of studies and everything, always say,

if you get berries and people's baskets, they buy more of other things as well. And you're always... Okay, so now I wonder if you might be able to take me around the store. Yeah, absolutely. I'm giving you a little tour.

Okay, cool. Okay, how were you Nicholas?

Thanks for the see you. Yeah, thank you.

“There are ways East San feels different than most other grocery stores.”

Like the way it hits you when you first walk in.

I love the bulk herb section because I feel like it gives every co-op a unique smell. This smell is so nice. I feel like the dominant smell right now is like... Yeah, absolutely. Yep, depending on where we go, we walk into Whole Foods.

It smells like they're seafood department. Yes. That dominates everything. In addition to bulk herbs, or bulk nuts, greens, and oats. There's kombucha on tap.

Yeah. There's Dr. Bronner's soap. Available in a buffet of these big pump bottles. Oh, on draft. Yep.

These are freshly ground peanut butter and almond butter. Coffee, olive oil, we have um, that's bulk sugar. We get these in 50 pound bags. And yeah, you got all your normal grocery store items. Pasta.

You want box macronic cheese. We have it.

“It's just that it's going to meet our products standards.”

And not have dyes or other chemical additives, preservatives. That aren't up to co-ops enough. So shopping at the co-op is a bit different than other places nearby. It's healthier. Maybe a little hip-ear.

But that's not to say it's up here. You may have to pay a little bit more for the quality stuff. But I met all kinds of people shopping here. A home-held aid. Barber.

A couple of people on snap benefits. But it turns out, it's maybe the most ideal place to look at rising food prices. Because unlike bigger chains like Kroger, which emitted to raising prices on certain items, beyond the rate of inflation in 2024.

The co-op model, which is owned by the very people shop there, means they are more motivated to keep prices low than they are to turn a profit. And without the scale or storage capacity, but big box store, they can't negotiate buying at higher volumes. So the prices at the co-op can actually be the most transparent prices.

And they give us a good look into how the war in Iran caused prices to surge. Last week there was an inflation report that showed that inflation was up by, like 4.2%, you got an email. Tyler brings his laptop over.

And on the sales floor, next is the prepared food section. He shows me an email forecasting price increases for July. This was the national co-op warning that there is a higher number of cost and price suggestion changes than normal in a month. Because the US had released its latest inflation report,

showing the highest rate of inflation in three years. Grocery prices aren't rising quite as fast. Up 2.7% over the past year. But the message from on high is that Tyler would be forced to raise prices around the store yet again. So essentially, national sends you this spreadsheet with hundreds of items with their skewers.

And they say we're going to have to raise a price on this. And you have discretion over whether actually we do it or not. We don't do that because that item is to stay low to attract customers. Exactly. And in July, where are the biggest markups?

This apricots has been a huge one. The bulk, dry apricots, is going up. Yeah, 140 over six months. That is this average change. Wow.

average change for your bulk apricots. 146 percent.

Sarah Pickle's up 83 percent.

But yeah. Pitches up 97 percent. Yeah. Mustard, 73 percent. Marcha, 73 percent.

Yeah. Bagels and English muffins. 10 percent. That's high. It translates to 41 cents per unit.

I mean, that's people will notice that. Tofu's up 1.22 percent. Yes. So I mean, because that's been a big thing. But fertilizer and most of them come from China.

So all the tofu stuff is going to be getting very high and getting higher. Anything over 20 percent to me is high. Yeah. And a six month period. Overall, these percent increases are attributable to.

Yes. All the inflationary facts. Yeah. Yeah. To both events.

So prices around the store are going up fast. Well, I wonder if you can, okay. We can continue walking through this store. And in particular, if you can walk me through certain items where the price has gone up, because of the war in Iran.

Yeah. Yeah. So where would that be in the store? So we got in this section. I asked Tyler to walk me through the store and show me how specific items have been

impacted by the war in Iran. We have a canola, safflower, sunflower, all of these types of oils. And explain to me the journey and chat to get here.

“And how would arrive at that secret price?”

Here's your standard field day vegetable oil. Field days are everyday low price brand.

Those went up 5 percent in the same month.

Cost more to transport. It's coming from farther distances. And also with field prices, some of the olive oils like equal exchange. You know, these are all from the West Bank. And so you factor in that conflict.

And then also the transportation fuel cost getting here.

Yes. Absolutely.

So that costs more to transport.

“So like beer companies, like everybody went to aluminum cans instead of glass bottles.”

Because of the weight on the truck. There's a value to keep beginning glass. It's a better product experience than plastic. But at a certain point, they might have to make that decision. Because it's so much heavier to transport.

They might have to make decisions. Your glass olive oil is the most expensive items on the shelf. Oh yeah. 1699, 2399, but the ones in aluminum, 1599. Yeah.

One glass jar could travel across the country like four times. You know, it's in theory. Olive oil could be produced in the West Bank.

Then bottled in California.

Travel by freight to be warehouse in Illinois. Before his driven down Pennsylvania turnpike to this grocery store. All of that brings up a ton of fuel. And then over here to the canned beans.

“Are the prices for beans going up or anything with aluminum?”

Aluminum, I think is going to be the next one. And then there's the cost of raw materials that go into packaging. Like soda. Anything that's packaged in aluminum can. That's going to be the next thing.

I think that's use a big price in 2016. And why aluminum? Last year, after Trump imposed a 50% tariff on aluminum imports. American buyers started sourcing more aluminum from the Middle East. Only to find that after the US attacked Iran, the new aluminum supply was stuck.

Because shipping through the street became impossible. Some smelters in the Middle East, factories where aluminum is made, stop production all together. Others, like when an Abu Dhabi, were directly damaged by Iranian strikes. But even as the US and Iran continue with peace stocks,

it will take a long time before supplies back to normal. The site in Abu Dhabi will have to be restored. And for the companies that stop production, a frozen line could take months to restart. Which means when the cost of aluminum dries up the cost of your olive oil in the coming months, it will stay that way for a while.

So where we head in now? But Tyler says there's really one item that reflects the forces leading to higher prices better than any other. We're going to head over to our meat section. And that's beef prices have gone up tremendously. It takes the most resources to have cows fed basically.

More so than chicken or seafood, anything like that. So beef is usually the first place we see in dramatic increase. 80, 20, grass fed beef, 999 for a one pound package. A ground beef of ground beef.

When we introduced that brand, it was always 699.

And then in the last year, so not necessarily strictly because of Iran. But all the fuel cost is going up. It's got up three dollars a pound just in the last year. So when you've got land in somewhere in the United States and you're raising a herd of cattle, it takes so much feed.

And industrial agriculture, a lot of that is coming from China. And so not only is it traveling a tremendous distance and there's all the associated fuel costs, but it's also getting stuck in the straight of Hormuz. China, India, huge producers of feed and fertilizer, and they all go through that straight. Same with oil.

“And then you have to then ship your cows.”

They go to a meat processing plan, which it's all on trucks. Transporting it and then the packaging. So at every point, you're seeing an increase in cost. And all that means has to go into plastic, which takes fuel. It takes fuel to make and ship.

And then all has to be cold, refrigerated or frozen, the entire time. If it loses the cold chain, it's waste, it's garbage. And there is yet another thing driving up costs. Dairy farmers are going dry all across America. Down on their luck, struggling with their own price increases of running a farm.

The share of farmers declaring bankruptcy has risen by 70% so far this year. The next generation for a lot of these farmers, they don't want to do it. And they see how hard it is. Here in Western Pennsylvania, Tyler's own bee suppliers have quit the business. Meaning, he now has to source his bee from further away, which could make his bee even more expensive.

It's a problem for Tyler and his customers, but it's also a problem for the Trump White House, which is doing whatever it can to lower prices. Before the 4th of July weekend, a USDA official pressured leading chain stores, a croaker and Walmart to lower the price of ground beef. Walmart dropped his price by 12%.

But this is just a temporary fix in the face of declining supply, rising costs, and unflagging demand for beef. This is our most shop-lifted case in the whole store. You're feeding me. Stakes and beef.

Yep, we had to add a security guard in the morning. We only had one afternoon, through closing time. We had to add one in the morning because it was getting shop-lifted multiple times a morning.

Wow.

“I choose to guide down the street, which we don't do.”

But I was like, this is, like, you are taking from our community.

And it was just, it felt so blatant at that point. Like, literally literally I had like a duffel bag. And I saw him standing here just throwing beef and ground beef and stakes and even like chickens into this duffel bag. And I tried to get him to drop it, and he just bolted for the door.

And I was like, I'm going after this. Like, I can't. And what happened? Well, I got like a block down the road. And then I was like, this is stupid.

Like, I don't want to get stabbed for me. Yeah, yeah. So we got away. Yeah, yeah. But this is like a jewelry house.

Yeah, beef case. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Wow.

“Tyler says it might be wild before beef prices stabilize.”

Just like everything else.

Economists have a name for it. Rockets and feathers. Prices go up like rockets, but come down slowly like a feather. Because even if the straight reopens, an even of oil prices come down, disruption in the supply chain takes time to readjust.

And if a new normal is accepted and there's no competition, manufacturers tend to keep the prices artificially high. And then if your grocery store buys and large quantities with prices locked in up to a year, they're stuck at that price for the year. And I'll be curious to see where we go to another store.

A, I don't know what's in that ground beef. But I'm also curious to see how much across at this point, even for like the lower quality conventional chemical beef products. How much they're going for? Exactly. Yeah.

Four new grocery stores have opened within four mile radius of us. The price increases is driving more people to the discount grossers. So we have in all these less than a mile from here.

They at first didn't really have much of an impact on us.

But now that the food inflation has reared up again in a noticeable way, we are seeing more and more people choosing lower quality product at a discount grosser for more of their basket. Tyler says he's already watched more of this customer shop at allty. And this is part of a bigger trend. He reads in all the industry reports. A few years ago, even as prices were rising, customers would do their shopping at multiple stores,

hitting each for their best deals and products. But now they're more likely to do almost all their shopping at one place. And a discount supermarket and not places like East End. And you can't survive because the customers are just coming in for one of their products. Yeah.

Like long-term no. But why would I have all this stuff? If shoppers start to see East End as a place to go to, for just a few items, and not the bulk of their groceries, it's not sure how it continues to survive.

Now I understand that part of your job is also scoping out prices of your competitors like allty. Would you bring me onto one of those? Yes, I'd love to. That'd be really fun. One of those trips, yeah.

Yeah, it would be my pleasure. Okay. Now how discreet do we have to be? They may have like a media policy. Okay.

Well, then maybe I will switch into different recording gear. Yeah. Just like a little bit more discreet. Sure. But maybe I should take a break.

I would like to take a break. After the break, Tyler and Jess go about the competition. We'll be right back. Tell me if any of this sounds familiar. Eating meat is the key to good health.

Nicotine can boost brain function. GLP ones are a miracle drug. I'm Danny Blum and the health reporter at The New York Times. We're bombarded pretty much constantly with claims about how to live better and feel better. And it's really hard to separate a fact from fiction.

“That's what really differentiates my reporting and the times is that I am scouring the science.”

I am speaking with leading experts. I am making sure that everything I write is rigorously research reported and that I can back it up. And when the science isn't clear, sometimes that is the story that we don't know the answers yet. And that's a level of nuance and depth you're not going to get just floating around the internet. That's what you get when you subscribe to The New York Times.

If you already subscribe, thanks. If you'd like to go to mytimes.com/subscribe. Put this in your back pocket and just clip this on top of your shirt. Later on the afternoon, Tyler and I wired up and watched eight minutes down a high traffic street. Next to a vacated right-aid, sits the Aldi.

Well, this Aldi looks really spanking new. Tyler routinely scopes his place out since it opened a year and a half ago. Alright, let's go. Let's do it. I hate seeing a suit store put a dollar $49.

A dollar for a number of blackberries. That's a little bit price. No, it's a great price. For a Georgian grown blackberries. Yeah, and honestly they're probably very good.

Maybe they're fantastic peaches, but all these doesn't have employees who would be calling this and keeping it nice.

“Whereas we have staff who part of their job in the produce department is to get rid of stuff like that.”

Because that's, nobody wants to see that. That's their whole model is like no labor. They just drop pallets on the floor. The bananas didn't even take out of a box. This is a very different shopping experience than at Tyler's store.

It's much bigger. The aisles are wider. No frills. As a shopper, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone to help you locate the parsley. If you workers we did see, we're clearing the sales floor of empty boxes or products were shipped in.

And no workers were needed to wrangle carts. You rent a grocery cart for a quarter and get that quarter back when you return it. No loose carts, no extra workers. Aldi told me in a statement that all of this is meant to drive down costs and low prices. A strategy that seems to be working.

Aldi is the fastest growing grocery store chain in the country with 180 new stores underway.

This watermelon, what is 450?

I can't even see it because there's some mush over the price. It's like 465 maybe. And it's a good looking watermelon. Honestly, it's got a nice sun spot. I bet it's tasty.

And yours is going for $19 per watermelon out front. Probably the local organic ones, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You see, you've been at this. Everything's in boxes.

Yep. And everything's in plastic. I mean, there's a broken egg inside the fridge. Yeah, that's bad. That's just yoke.

That's all over. We're crunchy. But I mean, for $146 a dozen. Yeah. $146 a dozen.

That is hard to beat.

I've never seen anything that long.

Yeah. So they're buying a ton and volume for as many stores as they can get the product into to get that deal. Like you may never see the same bag of chips twice. See what's over here and there and look at their beef. So we talked about that before.

Yeah. Let's see how low they can go. When we arrive at the beef case, we see a wide selection. Some even going for 479 a pound. Yeah, that looks busted.

This is the kind of beef coward didn't seem threatened by. Until I'm curious what they... We both looked up at the top shelf. 100% grass fed. And you reach overhead for a package.

A pound of organic ground beef. Boeing for 7209. Organic grass fed. Yeah. This is organic.

I mean, that's tough. I guess how do you feel seeing that? I mean, it's disappointing. I mean, I'm glad that they're offering organic option grass fed to their folks. There are other considerations with especially with me, like humanely raised that this doesn't talk about.

Our standards include humanely raised grass fed grass finished. Also, because in theory, you could give this cow one blade of grass and say it was grass fed. It doesn't say. That's the only thing it ever ate. It's whole life.

So that's a consideration.

“But what are you feeling when you see that they're able to opt for?”

And we don't really know how comparable. But to a consumer, pretty comparable product for... Right, for a little bit of $2.70. Yeah. Less.

A lot of people buy ground beef. It's a staple for a lot of meat-eating customers. And it's a very price-sensitive category. It's very much one that people are attuned to. Like eggs and milk.

Yeah, exactly. It's hard to say that we just got to stay on top of it all. You know, you can't slouch. That's what this says to me. Like, we've had lost.

I'm a little surprised at the volume of the organic beef. Like, is it that and stakes that? That's a little bit of a new thing for me. Yeah, there's like a whole shelf. That's like your maybe 1/10 of the other selection of beef is organic.

Yeah. To seeing this make you think you might want to lower your beef prices and then mark up something else in that store and where would that be? Yeah. Possibly.

That could be a solution or whatever my advertised deals items are that week. Add a dime to that for each product instead of the biggest discount possible. Figuring out how to copy with all these 729 grass fed organic ground beef requires a little math. Tyler could raise the price on his lamb. But he doesn't sell enough lamb to make up for what he's losing in beef.

So he could raise the price of a couple of other items around the store. Or normally he wouldn't have enough storage to buy ground beef at a high volume and it's lowest price. But he could bet that with a promotional price. He could sell beef fast enough that he wouldn't have to worry about storing it for long. We're not going to drive all these out of the organic ground beef market.

“But you have to try this thing as you try, you use all the tools in your toolkit”

and regain a little bit of that craft.

Anything else in here? I think we're good.

“And with that key bit of intel, our economist and strip was complete.”

The excavator. Oh yeah.

They forced you to go through the cash register.

Oh yeah. You got to break out of this all these. After I visit to Aldi, Tyler is figuring out a way to lower the price of his ground beef. By raising the price of his frozen beef and negotiating a lower rate with his beef supplier, he's hoping to offer his ground beef at 899.

A dollar lower than what he'd been charging. It's not the 7209 at Aldi. With Tyler says it's close enough to compete and low enough to put on flyers as a promotion item to customers. That's just one item and a store of thousands. Right now, he's putting in pre-orders for turkeys that would lock him in at current high inflationary prices.

Not knowing what he can sell them for, come November. To high wire act balancing these prices. With the hope that it all adds up. And then I think about the customers at both East End and at Aldi. Who asked me if the cost of groceries will ever go down?

What will happen in five or 10 years? And what would it mean for their children?

Tyler can't stay for a certain, but he says cost going up is just how it always goes.

Even if we see inflation numbers go down, it doesn't translate to normal food prices. It just means prices rise slower. And if one of the fallouts of the war in Iran is that a new fee will be imposed on every ship passing through the street, he says those costs will continue to be passed on to customers who have long gotten the message that they will just have to adapt. That's for a busy day to bring up our machine.

That's for a busy day to bring up our machine. Thank you. Do you blame anyone, like do you want someone to do something about this? It's not going to be done about that. Do you got to bite the bowl of it in a way? I got to find a way to come up with the money, you know?

I'm sure it's like 50,000 reasons and excuses while we're flammed with this. What are you supposed to do, price it goes up. It's just the way all you face it, and it means you have to be able to adapt to it. A lot of moms adapt. We're resilient. We've got adapt. You know it. We've got adapt.

“Are you finding that you have to make certain sacrifices to make ends meet?”

Cut back what I, I packed my lunch now for four months.

I ate watermelon every day for lunch.

For four months, you ate watermelon every day. Is that enough? Yeah, watermelon was in an apple. Yeah, in my water. Yeah, you get adjusted to it. And how much watermelon are we talking for lunch? Four or five nice pieces. I put it in the containers about that bag,

and I put that in there, and then I have an apple and I have a bottle of water. The food that I can eat is very limited. I can't just get peanut butter. I have to get like sunflower seed butter, which is extremely expensive, but sometimes I just won't eat. You just won't eat. I said, I've lost a lot of weight.

How long has it been going for that you feel like you have to skim? It's just been quite a while. I have kids that are cheerleaders. I have, we stop playing sports. I have practice, so they were hungrier than usual.

And my kids often are like, "Can I have some more?" I'm just like, "Sure." And that's your portion sometimes.

“But then I'll survive off of something small.”

Like I'll go eat ramen noodles or something. I'll make them dinner, and I'll go eat their chicken. I'll get to something. You can't eat like I used to. You have to like, space it out, I like.

Or run out of food. You mean eat less? Yeah. Oh wow. Yeah, eat less and budget more.

That seems like a real sacrifice and real change. It is. Sometimes try to eat one today or just twice. Wow. Yeah.

So, it meant too much portions. Just eat just enough. Eat to not be entirely full. But just eat just enough for your body to be okay. Have you ever had to do this in your life?

No. No. All with eight over eight. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. You try to make like pasta. Chickpean rice, kind of like jackfruit burgers. And we try.

What's your guys' relationship? Teach us. Oh. Yeah. Two teenage boys.

Two teenage boys. Welcome. Four two. They delight. Yeah.

They eat more than often. And that's why we have to sacrifice. Or, you know, eating as much because they need nutrition. I see. I see.

Like worried of, you know, not being able to provide for my family.

[ Music ]

A number of grocery store chains, including Walmart, Target, and Costco,

recently announced that they're cutting prices on some of their key products. But even with those deals, Americans' grocery bills are unlikely to fall. According to the Department of Agriculture, prices across all food categories are expected to rise 3.2% this year. [ Music ]

We'll be right back. [ Music ]

“Here's what else you need to know today.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, who epitomized his party's transformation from outright hostility

toward Donald Trump to flattering embrace of him, has died at the age of 71.

He's a race baby, xenophobic, religious big. He doesn't represent my party, he doesn't represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fine for. In 2015, as a Republican candidate for president, Graham led the charge against Trump, calling him a "cook, crazy, and unfit for office."

But once Trump won the presidency, Graham suddenly became his eager ally. Or colleague, Mark Liebovich, pushed Graham to explain that abrupt pivot in an episode of The Daily, back in 2019. You seem a little sick and tired of what's happened into Lindsey Graham question. Like, he's just like, yeah, like, okay.

“Nothing, from my point of view, if you know anything about me,”

it'd be odd for me not to do this.

Now, what is this? The world with him or try to be wrong, try to be wrong. Graham told Liebovich that his partnership with Trump was pragmatic and allowed him to achieve his own political goals, which over time included defending Ukraine against Russia.

Graham's office said that he died from a brief illness shortly after returning from his latest trip to Ukraine. And a tax between Iran and the U.S. continued to escalate over the weekend, with no signs of progress to salvage the ceasefire. After the U.S. military said that Iran had attacked another

container ship in the straight-of-war moves overnight between Saturday and Sunday,

“U.S. forces carried out some of their most intense strikes on Iran in weeks.”

U.S. central command said it hit about 140 Iranian military targets. In response, Iran attacked several U.S. allied Persian Gulf states, though the U.S. military said that those strikes didn't cause significant damage. The Iranian government said it also had closed the straight-of-war moves to shipping, though President Trump disputed that claim.

Today's episode was produced by Jessica Chung, with help from Michelle Bongeau. It was edited by Michael Benwa, with help from Paige Cowett and Patricia Willens. Fact-check by Will Paishal.

Fact-check by Will Paishal. And contains music by Marion Lazzano. Our theme music is by Wanderley. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Special thanks to Ben Castleman, Kim Severson, Kevin Draper, and Anna Foley.

That's it for the Daily. I'm Natalie Kitroeth. See you tomorrow. I'm Gilbert Cruz. This week on the Book Review podcast, author and plasticist Madeline Miller

gives us a primer on the Odyssey. They are flawed characters who try and fail and try again, who get angry and make mistakes. Plus times critic at large Tony Scott, and all the genres inside the Odyssey.

It has tons of its own action. Some of which is quite gory, is it a sexy story? Well, yes, it is. Listen to the Book Review, or if you get in podcasts. It's not a beautiful.