Food shopping these days is a pretty humbling and for some, humiliating experience, given the humongous rise in prices over the past four years.

Food inflation has risen 21.3% since the day Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office, and with no corresponding rise in wages. But many items sold at groceries are even higher, with some estimates showing food prices higher in the 30% range.

Voter after voter has said he or she would like some kind of credible answer to the question of what Kamala Harris would actually do to bring down food costs.

At a townhall meeting with CNN's Anderson Cooper hosting, they didn't get it.

Here's another video of the same thing with better sound quality but a bit too much editing at the beginning, although there is more material at the end:

For Americans, though, the reality is more like this -- Steve Cortes of the League of American Workers has put out a long and excellent investigative report:

Writer Naomi Wolf put out this tweet describing what she is now seeing at her local market in Brooklyn.

They're scrounging, coughing up pennies to buy a little at a time and trying to stretch it out. The RealClearMarketsTIPP "financial stress index" for consumers under Harris-Biden administration, averaging 65.8 over his presidency, is the highest average of the last four presidents. It currently stands at 67.8%, and three out of four Americans say they are struggling to pay their bills, and a quarter of them report skipping meals.

Yet Harris doesn't even try to give them an answer.

She changed the subject to 'price-gouging,' which typically happens during a natural disaster, not in everyday prices, then tries to change the subject to President Trump, inventing an obvious lie about a 20% sales tax on food.

Grocery stores, in fact, have razor-thin margins, as the grocer in the Cortes video explains, and they're getting hit hard by inflation up and down the supply chain:

Kroger's financials, recall, look like this:

Harris even lied about her record on her magic bullet for inflation, prosecuting price-gouging:

The gouging diversion is garbage, and she's taking the questioners for fools, thinking they're easily distracted from their own questions and the answers they genuinely want. What's more, she clearly has no idea where inflation comes from.

TIPP explains why:

Under Biden, the federal debt has increased by $6.9 trillion. To finance his spending spree, the Federal Reserve printed money from nothing. The increased money supply, without a corresponding increase in goods and services, reduced the value of each dollar, causing prices to rise quickly and leading to high inflation, effectively acting as a hidden tax on everyone.

Cooper, to his credit, did point out that price-gouging and inflation are not the same thing. But she has no answer for inflation other than more government spending, which is like putting fat on the already out of control fire.

Things are so bad some people are losing access to grocery places even to buy groceries.

People in New York typically shop at bodegas there where selection is limited, fresh food is scarce, and prices are not optimal, not because of gouging, but because smaller merchants cannot get the bulk wholesale rates of big box stores.

With food inflation going through the roof, the food is even scarcer and stressed groceries are going out of business for lack of profits.

Access to food is also difficult in other other settings, too. When I stayed in Topeka, Kansas a year ago to tend my sister's farm while her family went on vacation, finding any grocery store at all was difficult, with a battered, somewhat disorderly Dollar General being the main grocery establishment a couple miles' drive away. To mitigate, a lot of people even on nonfarm lands grow some of their own food, an option generally not available in New York City. But all of them are suffering, but it's not surprising to see the most obvious cases in New York.

Yet Harris has no answer to that, either, because she has no answer to inflation. She offers up a smorgasbord of little subsidies and remedies to this or that special interest group in her canned and repetitive answers, all of which would make inflation worse, but she has no insight about where inflation comes from, or the horrors of food inflation that hits voters every time they try to get a bite to eat.

She fails to give answers not only because she doesn't know where inflation comes from, but because she wouldn't like the answer she would have to give if she did, which is to cut government spending. So she'll just keep trying to change the topic and expect every voter to vote for her anyway.

That would explain why Harris isn't about to change her propensity to ignore voters and give them actual answers.

Image: Twitter screen shot