Why you're paying more for tomatoes and lettuce, but a little less for meat

Grocery prices in this month’s consumer price index are up slightly, on average. It’s up about 2% compared to this time last year, but that’s the average. Split up the food groups, and we start to see some bigger numbers.

Fruit and vegetable prices are up 4% compared to last year. Nonalcoholic beverages are up 4.7%. Meanwhile, meat and dairy are both down.

When it comes to fruits and vegetables, the main culprits are lettuce and tomatoes.

“They had a lot of heat and a lot of rain in not the order that they usually like to have those things in,” said Charlotte Ambrozek, who teaches economics at the University of Minnesota.

Too much fall rain splits tomatoes, and too much winter heat makes lettuce bitter. That means lower yields of both, as well as higher prices. As for the jump in beverage prices, “it’s almost entirely driven by coffee, and a lot of that is tariffs,” said Ambrozek.

Meanwhile, meat prices have fallen for two reasons, said food economics and policy professor William Masters at Tufts University. “Meat prices had been exceptionally high, primarily because of the relatively low number of livestock in the U.S. herd.”

Livestock farmers take a while to respond to demand, because it takes a while to breed and raise a cow. Prices are falling, Masters said, because supply is starting to catch up with demand.

On top of that, “prices had also been high because of the surge of demand, because of meat being this more fashionable thing now,” he added. (Blame all that protein-maxxing.)

And Masters said as that fad begins to flatten — we’re looking at you, fiber-maxxing — that also brings down the price of meat.