That’s especially unfortunate because it distracts from all the federal policy changes that actually could reduce food prices. The evidence that price gouging was responsible for the post-pandemic spike in food prices is somewhere between thin and nonexistent. Even if excessive corporate profits had been the cause of higher food costs, a price-gouging ban would do nothing to relieve Americans’ current burdens for the simple reason that food prices long ago stopped rising. Food prices in particular are shaped by volatile forces—weather, geopolitics, natural disasters—beyond government control or influence, which is why economists’ “core inflation” metric omits them. The USDA conservatively estimated in 2021 that the elimination of U.S. agricultural tariffs would benefit American consumers by about $3.5 billion.