According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, the global price of food has increased more than 40% since the middle of 2020:
The biggest gainer by far has been the 108% increase in the cost of vegetable oils:
This is partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's also due to the effects of climate change as well some plain old bad luck.
Here's a brief explainer on the spike in vegetable oil prices: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-07/record-vegetable-oil-prices-risk-even-faster-inflation
The Atlantic has an article on "greenflation" too:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/02/greenflation-prices-inflation-climate-change-coffee-lumber/621456/
Why on earth would it be called "greenflation". Not dealing with climate change is raising costs of everything now--but if we pump more oil, gasoline prices will drop. Then it would be cheaper to get the lumber...oh wait, the forest burnt down. Ok, cheaper to get the wheat and corn--oh wait, drought has cut into yields. At least it will be cheaper to import wind from France so it doesn't have that smokey flavor...oh wait, frost killed off their grapes...
From the linked article:
Note: this is a negative feedback loop - higher prices create the incentive fore more production - which will drive supply up to meet demand. Inflationary spirals happen if and only if positive feedback dominates.
In the US the CPI food index increased from 262.5 in March 2020 to 287.7 in December 2022, for an increase of 9.6% over almost two years. Evidently food has really gone up in some places but not so much in the US. Of course food is a lot cheaper in most places in the world, so increases in basic food items hit harder than here.
This is another indication that inflation is a worldwide phenomenon, not something that Biden did.
Once again, inflation is a fall in the value of a currency, causing "all" prices to rise. This would also be seen as a decrease in the value of the currency in foreign exchange. If the US suffers high inflation, it will take more dollars to buy pounds sterling, or euro, or Swiss francs, or yen. But then, inflation can't be global, every currency can't fall relative to every other. If prices are rising everywhere, it's just global price rises - not a total surprise, when we have two disruptive global events (pandemic and climate change).
Note that the chart is tagged as "adjusted for inflation".
Props to Kevin for using 'global price of food' and to the UN for labeling their charts as 'Food Index' and 'Food Price Changes', not 'food inflation'.
Obviously what we need to do is take the plants DNA, chop out the oil-making genes, stick it in a bunch of third world kids and BAM! Cheap, effective vegetable oil.
Swift would approve!