In recent weeks, I’ve come to a startling realization while pushing my grocery cart up and down the aisles of area supermarkets, namely that the monthly food budget I’ve been carrying around in my head is not based in reality. I’ve decided that my buying power expectations are at least 10 years out of date, which accounts for the acute sense of resignation I often have when the cashier announces my total.

Until recently, I thought the problem was simply that I didn’t shop astutely enough. Lately, however, I’ve decided that the real issue is my failure to accept how much things cost today. I came by this state of denial honestly, I believe, because some food prices really are out of whack.

At the risk of sounding like a crotchety grandparent complaining that you can no longer get into the movies for a nickel, let me explain. In the past month, I have witnessed the following pricing atrocities in the produce departments of area supermarkets:

¢ The $3.50 cantaloupe (priced at 2 for $7 and carrying the appalling notation that this was a price decline).

¢ The $1.50 cucumber.

¢ The $2 green bell pepper.

¢ The world’s wimpiest head of leaf lettuce priced at $2.

I also have stumbled upon $1.84-a-dozen eggs (the store brand, not free-range) and shocking meat prices too numerous to mention. But given my passion for fruits and veggies, I’ll concentrate my outrage there.

In such a pricing environment, it seems obvious that fresh, store-bought produce is a luxury many families cannot afford. Using the vegetables from the price list above and tossing in a bottle of salad dressing and a pound of hothouse tomatoes, which were $2.89 last week at one store, a family-sized tossed salad winds up costing about $10 to make from scratch.

Because many families can’t afford to make a variety of fresh vegetables a regular part of the diet, many American children are growing up without them as part of the family meal. As institutional food preparers squeeze their overhead, fresh vegetables become less frequent components of school lunch menus as well.

A correlation between produce prices and childhood obesity was suggested in a RAND Corp. study released last fall. The higher the price of fresh produce in a community, the greater the excess weight gain of children who live there. Children in the priciest vegetable markets gained as much as 50 percent more excess weight. The study did not track diet, just the price of fruits and vegetables and the body weight and mass of children in the study.

This situation is only becoming more grim as rising fuel prices are continuing to increase the price of shipping. In some parts of the county, truckers are adding fuel surcharges that are being passed directly on to consumers. Fuel costs as well as irrigation costs during this dry summer are likely to force prices higher at local farmers markets, as well.

If ever there were a time to lament the decline of the family garden, this is it. We have become so removed from the production of the food we eat that we are at the mercy of what the food industry charges.

This is not to say that growing your own is always cheap. At the rate I’m having to water this year, I’ll have quite a bit invested in my cantaloupes, cucumbers and bell peppers. Even so, the cost will be nowhere near the prices charged in the supermarket.