This isn’t just inflation. It’s shrinkflation, a business model built to enshittify one of our most basic necessities: food.
I didn’t need a headline to tell me that. I needed my own budget. Reviewing June’s numbers raised a red flag, but I told myself it was a fluke, a bad month, nothing more. July’s almost over. It wasn’t a fluke. After months of watching the cost climb while watching the size and number of items in our shopping cart shrink, my family’s grocery budget is now greater than my mortgage.
To ensure we are all on the same page, let me define two terms: shrinkflation and enshittification. Shrinkflation is when a company shrinks a product but keeps the price the same, or raises it.
Same box, less cereal, same or increased cost.
You’re not imagining it: you are paying more per ounce than you were paying two years ago, because the ounces disappeared quietly while the price held steady or crept up.
Enshittification, a term I’ve come to love and see happening everywhere, was coined by writer Cory Doctorow to describe how platforms degrade once they’ve locked users into their product. The concept works the same way here. First, a brand wins your loyalty with quality and fair prices. I live in Texas, where HEB reigns as king of groceries. Everyone knows why they should love HEB: “nobody does more than my HEB.” Then, once you’re dependent on the brand (and everybody’s dependent on groceries), they squeeze, not always with a higher price tag, but with what’s actually in the product. My wife and I checked over a dozen HEB in-house branded products ourselves. Every single one contained GMO ingredients. That’s not an accident; it’s cheaper to produce food that way, and it lets HEB sell you less real quality for the same shelf price. Want the GMO-free version? HEB has one, their Central Market brand. The package size is smaller than the regular HEB brand; you’ll pay more for it, but all the ingredients are real food. The squeeze isn’t always in your wallet up front. Sometimes it’s in what you’re eating, unless you can afford the version that isn’t. Same shelf, same or increased price, the brand you already trust.
One more thing before I move on: I'm not trying to call out HEB or pick on them exclusively. They're simply my local grocer. The same playbook holds at Kroger, Albertsons, Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, and just about every other chain out there; I just haven't personally checked their shelves the way I checked HEB's.
Watching my family’s grocery budget become our highest expense is a great example of what it means when a basic necessity, food, something every human depends on for survival, becomes a site of engineered scarcity for profit. My mortgage is a fixed number a bank calculated once. My grocery bill is a number corporations recalculate every time they think they can get away with it. That’s not inflation. That’s a choice, made by people with names and shareholders, about how much of my family’s survival they can extract before we notice.
Increased Food Cost is the Worst in a Generation
Let’s put real numbers to what my family’s been feeling. In case you weren’t aware, the last four years have brought about the worst stretch of food inflation in a generation. Food price inflation coincided with the highest rate of food-at-home price growth in over three decades in 2022, an 11.4 percent jump. This isn’t the kind of spike that just gets absorbed and forgotten. It resets the entire system and redefines what “normal” costs, and prices rarely come back down once they’ve climbed.
Since 2022, the climb hasn’t stopped, just slowed. Food prices rose an average of 2.6 percent per year across 2024 and 2025, and within that average, some staples spiked far harder than others. Beef and veal jumped 11.6 percent in 2025 alone, and ground beef specifically rose 21.8 percent in a single year, from $5.55 to $6.75 a pound. Eggs did something almost as brutal in reverse: retail egg prices spiked 32.2 percent in 2022, then 21.9 percent again in 2025, driven by an ongoing bird flu outbreak that keeps gutting the nation’s egg-laying flocks. Every time one crisis fades, another staple takes its turn getting more expensive.
None of this lands evenly. It never does. Food insecurity isn’t distributed by chance — it follows the same lines this country’s poverty and wealth gaps have followed for generations.
More than 1 in 3 Black and Hispanic adults reported household food insecurity in the last year, more than twice the rate reported by white adults. That gap isn’t new and it isn’t shrinking.
It’s the predictable result of Black and Hispanic households historically earning 60 to 75 percent of what white households earn, compounding year after year into who can absorb a grocery bill that keeps climbing and who can’t.
And when a family can’t absorb it, the damage doesn’t stop at an empty pantry. Communities without a full-service grocery store lean harder on convenience stores, gas stations, and dollar stores, where food costs more and offers less nutrition to begin with. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not a personal failing. It’s what happens when the cost of surviving keeps rising faster than the wages of the people most likely to already be priced out.
My entire adult life, I was told one of the best reasons to buy a home is that it locks in your most expensive cost at a set price. That truism is no longer reality in 2026. And for millions of families with a lot less cushion than mine, that aisle isn’t just outpacing the cost of housing; it’s outpacing families’ ability to ensure there’s enough food to make it to the next paycheck.
Chicken, Chocolate, and the Race to Replace Real Food
Here’s where the situation gets even uglier. The FDA has already deemed cultivated chicken made by UPSIDE Foods safe, setting the stage for a new era in meat production. The regulatory door is open. This lab-grown poultry is known as ‘cell-cultivated chicken.’ Instead of farm-to-table food, we’re moving to a lab-to-table model.
Chicken isn’t the only lab-grown food being replaced. Chocolate is further along, and it’s not fringe science. California Cultured, a startup growing cocoa from plant cells in bioreactors, is explicitly targeting the “bulk” chocolate used in candies like M&Ms, Kit Kats, and Reese’s. Mondelēz, the company that owns Cadbury and half your grocers’ candy aisle, has backed an Israeli startup called Celleste Bio, which recently raised $15 million with Mondelēz as an investor and produced the first cell-cultured cocoa butter, bio-identical to the real thing, with a commercial rollout targeted for 2027.
Even Wall Street is saying the quiet part out loud: financial analysts reported that Mondelez is turning to lab-grown cocoa specifically as a $12,000 price spike in cocoa fuels supply concerns, framing the technology as a way to reduce supply risk and protect margins. Real chocolate is becoming a luxury good in real time, and the companies that sell it to you aren’t racing to fix the underlying problem, the climate collapse and exploitative farming conditions driving the shortage. They’re racing to patent a replacement they can sell you once the real thing prices you out. Their own investors are telling you that’s the plan.
What’s happening is calculated; corporations are positioning themselves, patent by patent and partnership by partnership, to hand you a synthetic substitute the moment it’s cheaper for them than the real, whole, actual food your grandmother would recognize. This isn’t happening to increase consumer health or lower food costs; it’s being done to maximize profit.
We don’t yet know the long-term health effects of eating food built cell by cell in a bioreactor instead of grown in soil or raised on pasture. What we do know is we are the guinea pigs in this social experiment, and our food suppliers are charging us more to unwillingly participate.
This Result Wasn’t Inevitable or Predetermined
None of this was inevitable. I want to say it plainly, because the whole system depends on you believing otherwise. We’re meant to believe rising food costs are just the market, the invisible hand of trade, just how things are. They’re not. Shrinkflation isn’t a law of physics. Enshittification isn’t gravity. What’s happening wasn’t an inevitability. A company deciding to sell you less real food, or a different food entirely, so shareholders see another good quarter of increased profits, is a choice, made by people who could have chosen differently.
There’s no God-ordained rule that says the price of eating has to outpace the price of the roof over your head. There’s no natural law that says a bank’s fixed calculation on my mortgage should be more stable than a corporation’s calculation on what my family eats. It didn’t have to be built this way. It was built this way because a capitalist system that values profit above all else will, eventually, come for the most basic thing you need to survive, because that’s where the money is, and because you don’t have a choice about whether to buy groceries the way you might choose to skip a vacation.
That’s the part that should actually keep you up at night. Not the GMOs. Not the bioreactors. The fact that we’ve built an economy where a family can do everything “right,” buy a house, budget carefully, cut back where they can, and still watch the cost of eating become the biggest number on the page. I couldn’t fathom a reality where working a white-collar job and obtaining solidly middle-class status meant late-night conversations at the dinner table deciding whether to buy school supplies or make sure there’s enough food.
It doesn’t have to stay this way. Mutual aid networks, food co-ops, community gardens, and buying directly from local farmers won’t fix a system built on extraction, but they’re proof that another way of feeding each other is possible. What’s even better is it doesn’t require a shareholder’s permission. The question isn’t whether we can afford to keep eating. The question is how much longer we’re willing to let corporations decide what the costs will be while trying to convince us their way is the inevitable way.
@Untrickled by Michelle Teheux