Food for thought

For a while I suspected that Mrs Farooqui had a secret vault and that she had been squirrelling away a major chunk of the money I gave her on the first of every month to run the house. I had my reasons.

In the past, not too distant, she’d manage with half the damage. Not any more. These days she just haemorrhages money – squeezing it out of my pocket every few days and then not satisfactorily explaining where it all went.

It took a visit to the neighbourhood grocery the other day to allay whatever suspicion I had been harbouring against the good Mrs Farooqui, but the experience was more enriching than visiting the library. The hike hit me like a sack of rice but the visit was worth my while.

As I ambled around, I realised that these days the grocery doesn’t just represent a group of people buying foodstuff. The place is a fascinating study on how the common man deals with economic jargon like inflation, price index and supply side-issue as he tries to come to terms with the vagaries of shopping among price hikes (See Families feel the crunch).

Rising food costs are making a meal of our hard-earned savings.

Of course, we are not alone. From subsistence farmers eating rice in Ecuador to gourmets feasting on escargot in France, household budgets have taken a hammering everywhere in the world.

As many as 37 countries are facing full-blown food crises and the UN World Food Programme says it’s facing a $500 million shortfall in funding to feed a staggering 89 million needy people.

The picture is no less bleak in developed countries where even the most prudent of shoppers are tinkering with the margins of their tight budgets.

Until recently, payday used to be fun day. Today, it’s reduced to grocery day.

Sadly, academically-inclined fashionable terms used to explain all that’s being done to get a grip of things, make me none the wiser.

Because, try as hard as I might, my understanding of economic terms remains fairly limited.

One such term that I routinely hear in the context of things is ‘price ceiling’, which to me means that when you hear the prices you hit the ceiling.