Grocery bills have climbed so sharply over the past several years that millions of Americans have fundamentally changed how they shop, cook and eat, according to interviews with shoppers across the country conducted as part of a joint reporting effort between the Associated Press and three local news outlets.

A historic price surge

The cost of buying food to eat at home has risen 33% in U.S. cities since the start of 2019, according to government data, compared with just 6.4% growth over the roughly seven and a half years before that stretch began. The scale of the increase marks the steepest jump in grocery prices in half a century, driven by a combination of factors: pandemic-era supply chain disruptions, rising labor and transportation costs, droughts and disease outbreaks like bird flu that reduced production, tariffs that pushed up prices on imported goods such as coffee and chocolate, and the ongoing war in Ukraine, which disrupted global oil and fertilizer supplies. More recently, the conflict in the Middle East has added fresh upward pressure on food prices, turning affordability into a central issue heading into this fall's midterm elections.

Wages haven't fully closed the gap

Average weekly earnings for full-time workers have technically outpaced grocery price growth by a small margin since 2019, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But economists say that statistic doesn't capture how consumers actually experience rising costs. Jared Bernstein, a senior policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy who previously chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President........

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