Grocery inflation is a taste story now

Food news likes a chef. The current event is a receipt. Prices in the center of the store have trained a generation to treat olive oil as a luxury and chicken as a negotiation. Taste follows money, even when the culture pages pretend it does not.

What we are watching: private-label goods getting quietly good; restaurants using 'market price' as a mood; home cooks returning to beans with a sense of virtue that is also just arithmetic. If a product is a scam with better lighting, we will say so.