But not to worry about - the official Consumer Price Index doesn't include the food prices and increases.
Which "official" Consumer Price Index (CPI)? There are multiple "official" Consumer Price Indexes.
There is the CPI which is inclusive of an entire basket of consumer expenditures including food and energy. This is the CPI that generally makes headlines and news reports because it is more volatile.
Then there is the Core CPI which excludes food and energy because they are volatile commodities. Because of their volatility, they tend to skew the CPI and inflation rate up or down relative to other prices and the economy as a whole. Both are important to look at which is why they both exist.
I can't tell from your statement whether you were aware of this fact or not. If you were, it's a misleading statement. If not, that's understandable as many people are unaware of what the various CPI indices are (and there are more that just those two main categories), what they represent, or how they are used by economists.
You can find a basic explanation here...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/CPI-AUCSL vs CPI-LFESLThe Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items (CPIAUCSL) is a measure of the average monthly change in the price for goods and services paid by urban consumers between any two time periods. It can also represent the buying habits of urban consumers. This particular index includes roughly 88 percent of the total population, accounting for wage earners, clerical workers, technical workers, self-employed, short-term workers, unemployed, retirees, and those not in the labor force.
The CPIs are based on prices for food, clothing, shelter, and fuels; transportation fares; service fees (e.g., water and sewer service); and sales taxes.The "Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items Less Food & Energy" is an aggregate of prices paid by urban consumers for a typical basket of goods, excluding food and energy. This measurement, known as "Core CPI," is widely used by economists because food and energy have very volatile prices.A more detailed explanation of how these various CPI and other consumer price indices are reported by news outlets or used as political talking points is available, for those with an actual interest in such things, in this article from Forbes.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2021/07/14/there-is-no-inflation-the-june-cpi-headline-head-fakeThe article concludes with...
The monthly inflation scare headline is like that car alarm that keeps going off in the middle of the night when the garbage truck rumbles by. It is annoying, but we know that we don’t have to call 911 every time we hear it go off. Why do we allow the inflation alarm to rattle us this way, every month, without a sense of perspective?
We are fortunate that the Fed, and the markets, are able to evaluate these numbers with an appropriate skepticism. But there is a lot of irresponsible journalism here. The distorting factors reviewed above are not hidden, and in fact they are widely understood today, even by most journalists — and yet many in the media, and many professional pundits (who certainly know better), still choose to emphasize these misleading figures. Does the press not have a duty to educate the public? Or is it really just about selling more newspapers, or capturing more clicks?
