It's no longer just food. Everything is exploding in price. For the past 5 years obozo has been giving literally trillions of dollars to the bankers and they've been putting it in stocks and driving the market higher. Now that the stimulus ( banker welfare) is ending, the big boys are getting out of stocks and all that money is getting into the real economy.
Monopoly capitalism is when a small network of large businesses (along with the investment class) take control of all domestic sectors, and then they raise prices until there is nothing left to pilfer, at which time they parachute into decadent wealth and dynastic safety, thus leaving the host nation with dilapidated infrastructure, terrible debt and mass poverty, as they sequester themselves behind hyper-secure gated neighborhoods. [You don't think corporations fund elections and lobby congress for fun? The point is to create a world where you use the centralizing power of the state to fleece the serfs and live large]
To be more specific. Monopoly capitalism is achieved when big sectors - energy, health care, telecom, etc - use financial leverage to capture the regulatory and legal machinery of the state (while using things like Talk Radio to confuse the public about who owns government). Once government is captured by the capitalist class, they get rid of anti-trust legislation so that they can divide the country into fixed no compete zones. This means most internet suppliers can raise rates/decrease services without losing customers. Same for energy, where big oil supported Reagan, who crushed the alternative energy movement in the early 80s, which locked us into the crippling costs of disappearing petroleum.
And lets not even talk about mergers and acquisitions - also accelerated in the 80s under Reagan. You get this right? It's when corporations buy each other to avoid competition. This allows them to raise prices without fear of losing customers, who are actually zombies, kept alive by plastic and debt, wandering shopping malls with blank faces buying goods made in China, the very place where our noble and patriotic capitalists shipped their jobs (cheap labor).
The logic of capital is to get as much money from the poor consumer humanly as possible. To do this you must lobby congress into submission, fund elections and staff government . . . so you can build a monopoly, then sit on your ass and charge rent. Why innovate or offer competitive pricing if your customers have no options?