Everyone on the right, most in the middle and some of the left seem to lean on blaming whatever party is in charge for inflation. Inflation hits hardest for most people at the grocery store, followed by the gas pumps.

But, who’s fault is it that you can’t afford a decent ribeye steak? Have you seen the price of a bottle of real extra-virgin olive oil lately? How about chocolate? Coffee? The average price of groceries has gone up 21% in the 3 years since Joe Biden has been in office, and it’s easy to see how pretty much everyone is willing to point the finger at him, and Democrats in general.

Yet, despite the efforts of Governor Ron Santis to hide the words “climate change” from every state document, we all depend on a stable climate world-wide to fuel our grocery stores.

Go into any decent chain supermarket these days and take a look at the produce aisle. No matter what time of year it is locally, you’ll find pretty much anything you could possibly want to cook for dinner, despite the fact that it might be “out of season.” Want fresh vine-ripened tomatoes? No problem. How about a cantaloupe? Or a bright yellow summer squash? Who care’s that it’s snowing like hell outside – you are here for the fresh raspberries you want for dessert and the avocado you intend to stuff with fresh tuna when you get home.

When I was a kid, my dad always had a large garden where he grew amazing things like corn and tomatoes and eggplants and potatoes and ….well, you name it, my dad could grow it. And, my mother didn’t hesitate to get the fresh produce we couldn’t eat right away into a mason jar. She had a huge old-fashioned pressure cooker pot, with the jingling-hissing weight that danced away on the top. She would gather whatever produce Dad had grown and that we couldn’t eat right away and do whatever it took to get it preserved and into a jar. Later, we did modernize a bit and a lot of produce also got frozen and put into the “deep freeze”.

By the time I can remember going into a supermarket, you were beginning to see some “imported” items, but most of the fresh produce that you could buy was something that came from not very far away. Refrigerated tractor-trailer trucks were around, but they were very early versions and it was unlikely you were going to get an avocado or a mango or a tomato outside of whatever season they normally would grow in for a few hundred miles around.

Today, the entire supermarket is something that would have been considered as magical in my day. You can buy staples from all kinds of cuisines located from all around the world. Want a special thai sauce? Check! How about a fresh cantaloupe – oh – my! Grown in Ecuador!. Mango’s from Mexico, cucumbers from Chile – our produce counters today are stocked high with fruit and vegetables that have no business being there most of the year if you looked at local growing seasons.

Yet, because of Climate Change, we are seeing today that crops world-wide are being decimated. Grapes are dying on the vine in Europe, endangering the future of many popular wines. It is so warm on the slopes of the Andes mountains that coffee plantations are withering and bananas as we know them in our supermarkets are slated for extinction in the next few years.

Over half the planet depends on a rice heavy diet, yet much of South Asia has had their crops ruined and the billions of people who depend on a stable rice price are beginning to go hungry.

How is the resulting price increase in food being blamed on the administration of a single country in the world? No matter what political party is in charge, there are forces at work that are inexorably forcing our cost of living ever upward, yet we still continue to elect people into office that have their heads poked firmly into the sand, wanting only to point the finger of blame at the other party.

So, instead of pointing the finger at whoever is in charge of one small part of the world, why not instead take a look at those candidates for political office who are aware of the problem we consumers face, and have some sort of logical plan for us to begin to learn how to live in the world that we’ve made for ourselves?