What one pays in reality has more relevancy than any other static. In my area prices are up. I keep records of what's spent and without changing shopping habits my bill is up 13%. Anecdotal? You'll have to explain that to my food budget.
When you say "relevancy," you have to specify what it is relevant in relation to. If aggregate food prices aren't climbing by that much, your personal experience, relevant as it is to you, isn't relevant to a national assessment of food inflation.
Personal experiences with food inflation can be affected by many things, including your buying habits and various factors which are regional, meaning they may affect other people who live in your area but not necessarily reflect a national trend.
Since this forum is about politics and news, I'm not really sure about the relevance of personal food budgets here. I guess we can start a thread so that people can bitch about how much money they're spending on food, but that seems like more of a social topic. If the topic is the national economy, we have to do better than cite our personal experiences. I cited mine above, and as I already said, it's not all that relevant to the national economy either.
You have a background in science, meaning I presume you understand something about statistics. So I think you know exactly what I'm talking about here, and that I'm quite correct.
- wolf